For this week’s assignment I taught myself how to use the Jing application (see Jing.com) to demonstrate Degreed.com. Degreed provides a free platform for learners to record their lifelong learning from everywhere, which will be very useful for me. It was mentioned in the source article assigned by the instructor (Gallagher, 2017) , and the description “Learning Experience Platform” piqued my curiosity. Jing allows you to capture screengrabs or videos of what you are doing on your screen. This is right in line with the Microlearning philosophy of keeping content to a manageable length.
Jing imposes a limit of five minutes for your recordings and it’s meant to be a very quick, informal way to create content. The five minutes does impose a bit of discipline! I realised it goes by quickly, so you have to think about your demo in advance and what you are going to say.
To learn the application I watched one help video from Jing and read one help page, then I was ready to get started. After two false starts I finally came up with a good-enough recording. I’ve uploaded this to Screencast and here is my handiwork (NOTE: I found out you need to have Flash player to view the recordings as I’m using the free version. That may be an issue which one could avoid by buying the paid version or perhaps by buying SnagIt. In that case you can create an MP4 video, which is more easily shareable.)
I would say I used Connectivism and Andragogy as the primary learning theories to teach myself these two applications, for these reasons:
1. I evaluated options and decided myself what would be worth learning, consistent with both theories.
2. The items I chose were immediately useful to me in my work and life (Andragogy).
3. The items I chose to learn were conceptual “nodes” or an offshoots of materials provided by the instructor (Connectivism).
4. I looked at the online help materials to teach myself the basics. I had to experiment a bit and search forums to troubleshoot a couple of technical issues (Connectivism).
5. I was free to experiment and make mistakes. It took me three attempts to get a video I was reasonably pleased with (Andragogy).
6. I’m publishing my experience for my peers to review and provide feedback (Connectivism).
Source:
Gallagher, S. (2017, November 6). As Corporate World Moves Toward Curated ‘Microlearning,’ Higher Ed Must Adapt. Retrieved December 10, 2017, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-11-06-as-corporate-world-moves-toward-curated-microlearning-higher-ed-must-adapt