Nelson. Wordclouds. Communities of practice | Cloudworks. Etienne Wenger – Communities of practice Learning in practice – a social perspective, Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) theory. Four aspects Community - Where do we belong? Identity – Who are we becoming? Meaning – What is our experience? Practice – What are we doing? Who are our students and how do they know who they are and how they are placed in society? Original communities of practice theory was developed before the emergence of the web Meaning and meanfulness are a key component of the theory BUT its about developing meaning making in the real world, situated nature of learning is crucial There is a real issue in terms of educational systems validating informal learning – there is a real tension between vertical vs. horizontal learning.
Complex inter-relationship between: space, time, locality, practice, boundary crossings between different practices. Core and boundary learning What are the implications of a theory like this for professional educational? LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud. LivePlace.com has posted a video displaying a very impressive render of a 3D virtual world called City Space. At this point very little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since I spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it). Update: They’ve taken the video down. We’ve republished a copy, below. The other nugget of information found in the video is that the game is running on OTOY, the 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud.
The technology allows relatively weak computers (or even mobile phones) to display incredibly detailed graphics comparable to those seen in Hollywood movies. Note: We’ve put up a slightly modified version of the video at the request of OTOY. Update 3: Here’s what OTOY’s Jules Urbach has to say: Summary of Cloud Intelligence Symposium / Cloud Intelligence. Stephen Downes, Anders Sandberg on Cloud Intelligence. Posted by Ethan on Sep 9th, 2009 in ideas | 0 comments I had the pleasure of sharing the stage at Ars Electronica’s symposium on “Cloud Intelligence” with Stephen Downes and Anders Sandberg.
I wasn’t able to liveblog their presentations, in part because I was jetlagged, and in part because they both gave extremely dense, thoughtful presentations. Better late than never, here are my notes days after the fact. Canadian researcher Stephen Downes began the conversation on Cloud Computing at Ars Electronica with a complex, sophisticated talk about collaboration, conviviality and communication in virtual worlds. I’m slightly reluctant to blog it, because I’m still wrestling with the ideas, and suspect I won’t do justice to the complexity of the arguments… but here’s a gloss on some of the ideas.
Downes warns that our understanding of human behavior is based on folk psychology, an understanding of human nature based on fictions. Systems benefit by adding feedback.