Stephen Downes: A World to Change. This week I am in week five of an online course called PLENK, which I'm offering with three colleagues in the research community here in Canada. As we reach the midpoint of the course, enrollment has just passed 1500 student mark. The discussions are reasonably active, we're aggregating 227 student blogs, 1340 of them are reading the daily newsletter, and the tweet count has just passed 1701. We're not the first people in the world to offer an online course, of course. Nor is this the largest online course ever offered -- it doesn't even match our own record of 2200 participants, which we reached in 2008 with Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, much less the other online courses that have been offered over the years.
PLENK -- Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge -- is about an emerging online learning technology called the personal learning environment, or PLE. Some of us are building PLEs. What are we to do? Because, you know, change does not come from the system. René Descartes. Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. His best known philosophical statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 – written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 – written in Latin). Early life[edit] Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. In his book, Discourse On The Method, he says "I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Visions[edit] According to Adrien Baillet, on the night of 10–11 November 1619 (St. Work[edit] Death[edit] In 1991 E. Steam Aged Education #PLENK2010. The #PLENK2010 session today was about learning theories and employed a few allusions to the age of steam power. I like the analogies to the history of technology.
Like the examples from the development of the printing press, examples of societal responses to steam technology can be instructive respecting the response to information and communication technology. Many institutional education activities are throwbacks or hold outs from an earlier era. Remnants of the industrial era that preceded this information era. Still people try to squeeze current experiences with learning into an older industrial model. A while ago I read an article “Is IT Becoming Extinct” by Miguel Guhlin The topic of In-house IT systems and the development of utility computing has been interesting. Many of the institutions in the early days of electricity had their own power generating plants. Same thing with IT, utility computing is here. New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills. Vision of the Future - Part 1 by Howard Rheingold My interest in this subject has always been very personal. And I want to start by emphasizing that the use of online communication for socializing by young people is nothing new.
Certainly, the amount of access and the power of the tools available now is significant, but today's online social networks have evolved from the BBSs in teenager's rooms that I started accessing in the 1980s when I first started exploring the online world. Twenty years ago, I discovered social cyberspace when I was looking for new ways to connect with other people. What I have to say comes from what I've learned as a student of social cyberspace, and as a Netizen. Virtual communities are more than an area of expertise for me. My interest in new media literacies was kindled more than ten years ago, when my daughter was in middle school. Two phenomena in the early 1990s drew my attention: Who is the author? What do others say about the author? End of Part 1. New media literacy: what is it? « Cruiselyna's Blog. I’m indeed very glad that, after a couple of days of indecision of my involvement with the #PLENK2010, I’ve made good progress with some of this week’s materials.
In particular, I’m glad that I’ve learnt two new ideas. First, I’m happy that I’ve learnt about the idea of media literacy. Second, I’m also glad to learn about the life history of Robin Good, aka Luigi Canali De Rossi. To make things clear from the start, the media literacy that I’ve learnt tonight should be more correctly called new media literacy.
“amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet.” The important part that the Internet and modern media technologies play in this amalgamation means that information can be made available to anyone, from anywhere, anytime. This new media literacy, according to Wikipedia, refers to: Like this: Like Loading... A Plethora of Personal Learning Environment Distinctions #plenk2010 - PLE's, networks, knowledge & me. Dave?s Educational Blog. My PLE model is the internet – no more system for me @ Dave’s Educational Blog. I had hoped to get this post out last week, but the dissaggregation 2 post came out instead and here I am in the middle of week six trying to combine a post that addresses both evaluation and success… and then i realized… that kinda makes sense.
The problem with creating an evaluation model for a PLE is that it will inevitably have a strong impact on the success of the PLE. If the PLE is essentially about emancipation (which Scott Leslie tells me everyone believes in the comments of the previous blog post) then the scaffolding applied to allow for evaluation seems like the other end of the counterbalance. This post is as much a simple reflection on my own practice… I hope you find it useful. Presenting The Challenge In the passed several blog posts we’ve talked about how the PLE can contribute to people committing to learning in a different way. To learning as practice… as a side effect of the work that they do everyday. Phase 1. Phase 2. Phase 3. Phase 4. Formal learners have the best of both worlds? Thanks Dave, your post has finally made me put my fingers on the key board to write the post that I have been thinking about for the past days.
You start with where most discussions on the PLE originate, in an opposition to the institutionally controlled LMS. To me it seems more helpful not to take the technologies as the central point of discussion, but the forms of learning: formal (as in institutions) and informal (as on open online networks). The idea I liked most to move from formal towards informal learning comes from Ivan Illich, who would like to rid us of ‘scholastic funnels ‘(1992) and instead create ‘community webs’ .He would like people to be able to call on the teacher or peers of their choice, teach if they feel they have something meaningful to say and call meetings to share resources whenever possible (1971).
This sounds pretty much like a Personal Learning Environment to me. To move community webs onto online networks was never his plan, though. 1. 2. 3. 2. Conclusion. How To Be Heard. MS-Word version, for printing Every man is the hero of his own story - Dylan Hunt Writing a blog can be a lonely business. How many blogs have been started to languish with no readers day after day, week after week?
Others, seemingly inexplicably, attract thousands of readers, hundreds of links. What's the difference between them? The short answer is, partially, yes. This guide will help you change that. Plan It is possible to launch a blog without a plan. It may not appear to be so because of my informal style, but OLDaily was in planning for months before it actually launched. Purpose Why do you want to write a blog? The MuniMall Newsletter had a very clear sense of purpose.
This will be true for you too (and you may as well be honest about it, at least with yourself). Most blogs display a certain amount of self-interest. Write out the purpose of your blog. Content What are you going to write about? What are you going to write about? Support And then what? Me? Process Now you have a plan. Font. FINAL Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010.
Dynamic learning maps. The project has now completed. The final report is available from the bottom of the page. Dynamic Learning Maps Navigable Dynamic Learning Maps will be developed and evaluated to assist students and staff in actively mapping learning by drawing on formal curricular and personalised learning records, supported by easy-to use facilities to add and rate resources, and tools to support discussion and reflection. These maps will fuse both “semantic web” and, “Web 2.0” approaches, building on established technologies and standards to provide “mash-ups” of resources and curriculum information (managed learning environments) and personal learning records (ePortfolios/blogs). The project will meet a number of JISC Programme objectives and will be of value to the wider HE/FE community. Aims and Objectives Provide a navigable map of both formal (planned) curricula and personalised learning records.
Project Methodology The project has been split into nine packages of work: Technologies/Standards used. Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save at Helpful Technology: Blog. Neil struck a chord with me a while ago in a post about his iPhone apps, where he described Instapaper, for him, as the place ‘where saved webpages go to die’. Like a lot of people, I use services like Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious and Instapaper to help me find and store interesting links to articles, tools, apps or whatever.
Personally, when I don’t have time to read it right now, I tend to star an item in Google Reader, ‘favourite’ it in Twitter, or mark it to ‘Read later’ in Instapaper – often five or ten things a day. I also save interesting stuff to Delicious, particularly where I think it may have longer term usefulness. But I hardly ever actually go back and read those things. Mainly it’s because it’s a bit of a faff finding the links, and because the time I’d get to do it (on the train, hanging around waiting for a toddler to wake up, etc) I’ve generally only got an iPhone to hand.
Hence Reading. Here’s what it looks like in a desktop browser: