mPLE demos during ALT-C 2009. Hedtek Ltd demonstrated the Manchester Personal Learning Environment at two fringe events during ALT-C 2009.
Overview The Manchester PLE was first conceived of a response to a perceived lack of usable open source software to support communities and learning in those communities. Informed by social constructivist and constructionist perspectives, the Manchester PLE is designed to support individual and group learning activities. The intent is for the PLE to be used by self-directed and peer-assisting groups of learners (possibly teacher-led, but without any special status for teachers in the PLE). In order to support this vision of learning, the Manchester PLE combines a social software layer with advanced multi-user multi-media spaces where learners can meet and collaboratively perform learning activities in real time.
The Manchester PLE is close to the start of a release cycle, and will be released open source. Social software layer Spaces Some examples of space use follow. The Second Life Learning Environment. At a recent class for Imagilearn SLemester, lead by John Jamison or Virtual Bacon ( ) in Second Life, Madddyyy Schnook ( Second Life name) was the presenter.
Madddyyy made the following statement, “Why have we got a floor, why are we sitting down, why do we have a roof? And a fire? We live in a world that is not bound by real life constraints, remove all of the comfort zones and then you bring (people) out of their comfort zones—then you have a product (an) educational product to work with---outside the box thinking.” In response Virtual Bacon observed, “That’s a great point---we’ve thought a lot about that here—and our floors and roofs are intentional because our primary goal here is bringing traditional education (educators) into Second Life—and we have found that familiar appearances helped a great deal during that initial period,” Both of the people are right in their observations …Second Life, like the Wild West has had to “conform.”
CCK08: Introduction and Distributed Technical Frameworks. The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On. An MS-Word version of this essay is available at Spanish Translation, by Diego Leal.
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold. In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. New Technology The development of new technology continues to have an impact on learning. Bandwidth As administrators struggle against the demands video streaming and bit torrent networks place on backbones, it is hard to imagine saying that bandwidth will be unlimited. And access to bandwidth continues to improve. Processing Storage Software.