WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Sometimes websites don’t describe themselves very well at all. Take the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (EET), for example. Yes, it has information about educational technology (surprisingly!) but it also has a surfeit of information about all different kinds of really interesting and useful stuff for educators. Let’s take a closer look…
Taking academic research as its starting point, and adding in a bit of Quicktime and Shockwave wizardry for good measure, EET (a product of San Diego State University) has articles on everything from Active Learning to Wikis, under the headings:
- Cognition and Learning
- Analysis
- Design (sub-cats: Data representation, eLearning, Learning Strategies, Message Design, Learning Objects, Using Color, Video Learning, Visualization, Navigation)
- Development (sub-cats: Accessibility, Visual Design, Multimedia Development, Television Production, Tools, Training, Virtual reality, Web-based training)
- Implementation
- Evaluation
This is a real find, as it means that a lot of the guides I was intending to produce over the coming months have largely been done. Of course, there are some which aren’t quite presented in the way I would have done, but they’re still rigorous, quality articles which provide more (useful) information and guidance than perhaps a lifetime worth of INSETs could!
Of the ones I’ve had a chance to explore, the following have caught my eye:
Blooms Revised Taxonomy
The work done by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) is discussed in this article which lists specific ‘trigger’ verbs which can be used at each of the cognitive levels (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create).
Flow: The Optimal Experience
During reading for my MA in Education, I’ve seen Csikszentmihalyi (1990) referenced a lot, but never got round to reading it. Now I see what the fuss was about - he looks at the relationship between challenge and skill and providing the ‘optimal experience’. The experience is thus ‘autotelic’: it is rewarding regardless of what the original goals were.
Subliminal Learning
I’ve always been interested in the ways people can learn almost ‘by accident’ and by the way the brain can take things in without the person being fully aware that it is doing so. Whilst subliminal messages have a bad name in terms of advertising, they have a positive role to play in education. A couple of examples from the article:
The following techniques can be used to promote subliminal learning. A clear watermark notating something that the learner needs to remember can be embedded into the background of text.
and:
Verbal suggestions that reference what the learners needs to remember can be mention while presenting other more interesting text to influence memory.
There’s an abosolute wealth of interesting, useful information available here - go straight to the Table of Contents and learn something new today! 
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