take your readings and go for a walk.

“What do I really think about these topics?” “What did this writer really mean?” “What are different things she could have believed instead, and why did she choose this particular angle? “ “What would I have said?” “What do I really think about this? Why?”

Dig out a tiny gem of thesis that fits your personal take on the material.

settle down in the most inspiring possible room

spend just alone with their thoughts, sifting through, in a complicated inner monologue, what they believe and why. Essays and small papers offer you this opportunity. Most students ignore it and instead just blaze ahead blindly in their comfortable, “I hate papers!” writing-centric approach.

Take a 1 – 2 hour idea vacation before your fingers hit the keyboard.

t took me a minute to figure out the moodle system.

'a rich and complex network of relationships in which we must both speak and listen, and make claims on others, and make ourselves accountable' (Parker Palmer 1993: xii)

as Carl Rogers might have put it, from the diadactive to the facilitative.

This distinction is crucial to knowing, teaching and learning: a subject is available for relationship; an object is not.

the subjects around which the circle of seekers has always gathered - not the disciplines that study these subjects, not the texts that talk about them, not the theories that explain them, but the things themselves (1998: 107).

Clearly community is a process. But it is also a place.

The task of the educator in all this is to make a space so that the great thing has an independent voice, to speak for itself - and to be heard and understood.

In To Know As We Are Known, Parker J. Palmer argues that a learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries and an air of hospitality (1983; 1993: 71-75)

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together

Heppell (2001) argues that “we continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes.

Daniel (1996) has argued that elearning is the only way to cope with expanding global demand for higher education, claiming that “a major university needs to be created each week” to meet the proposed demand.

f we view our online learning environments not as analogies of how we currently teach, but rather as a metaphor for how we engage with changes required for a digital society, then this provides us with some insight in to how to tackle the issues above (and others).

Siemens (2008) argues that “Learning theories, such as constructivism, social constructivism, and more recently, connectivism, form the theoretical shift from instructor or institution controlled teaching to one of greater control by the learner.”

Why would we seek to recreate the sort of learning affordances Wesch highlights in a virtual environment, when we are free to construct it however we wish?

Arguably then there has never been a better alignment of current thinking in terms of good pedagogy – i.e. emphasising the social and situated nature of learning, rather than a focus on knowledge recall with current practices in the use of technologies – i.e. user-generated content, user-added value and aggregated network effects. Despite this, the impact of Web 2.0 on education has been less dramatic than its impact on other spheres of society – use for social purposes, supporting niche communities, collective political action, amateur journalism and social commentary.”

"Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs

connectivism (Siemens 2005) places decentralisation at the heart of learning:"Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing"

Wikipedia succeeds by decentralising the authoring process, YouTube succeeds by both decentralising the broadcasting production process, but also by allowing embeds within blogs and other sites, thus decentralising the distribution process

Knowing how to link to and locate resources in databases and search engines is a skill for a decentralised information world. The result is that online references are forced into an existing scheme, which has an inherent preference for physical resources. The traditional reference is often provided in papers, when it is the online one that has actually been used because the referencing system is biased towards the paper version.

‘eduglu’

SocialLearn has been conceived as a deliberate attempt to discover how learners behave in this sphere, how to develop the appropriate technology and support structures, what pedagogies are required and what are the business models for education in a disaggregated educational market.