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"Stephen Downes about Personal Learning Environments"

The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On An MS-Word version of this essay is available at http://www.downes.ca/files/future2008.doc 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. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today. In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year's experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper - time has done that - but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.

"The Personal Learning Environment concept is relatively new and is often used interchangeably with Personal Learning Network. The earliest reference is attributed to George Siemens in his 2004 paper, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Downes and Attwell have also popularised the concept with Downes describing the PLE as "a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources" (2006, p23). Semantically, a personal learning environment and a personal learning network differ, with a network referring to connections and the interaction between them, and an environment referring to a broader definition that includes more passive tools and settings. The network and its broader socially constructed environment are interdependent, constantly shaping each other and unable to be separated."

"The term 'educational technology' is a difficult one to pin down. There are some who would argue that every tool we use, from a ballpoint pen to an electronic whiteboard, is an educational technology. Others strive to pin down best practices with choice technologies and advocate for this or that brand of technology enhanced pedagogy as scientifically proven to better the learning process in some way. Some people think that social networking is faddish, or, worse, a sign of the decline of our civilization. Others will argue that if we do not bring it into our classrooms we are doing our students a disservice and becoming increasingly out of date. As an educator working on such slippery foundations, I have taken the position that all these things are true. Social networking is both faddish and dangerous as well as critical to moving forward. Our tools are both simply a reflection of the same tools and methods of millennia and complex mechanisms fraught with implicit pedagogy. This course takes all opinions on education and technology as valid and mixes them together, to be interpreted by our own class as well as being validated by a wider network of educators. "

"Keeping abreast of news in your niche can be tough. I know the feeling of being left behind, when you think you need to be checking thousands of feeds 24 hours a day. Fact is you do not need to have such a punishing regime. I have been known to follow stupidly excessive amounts of RSS feeds, plus my Twitter following got well out of hand. My feeds are now down to 300 and I am slowly trimming who I follow on Twitter. I'm down from 900 and some to hopefully approaching a manageable number below 700. This might still seem like a lot to you, how do I manage to follow so many feeds? Here are 21 tips for a more productive approach to keeping up with all the crucial developments in your niche. They will work for feeds or Twitter in most cases but I have aimed mainly at RSS:"

In the late 90's there was a lot of energy around "virtual communities." They were touted as the ultimate web deployment, the key to online commerce and later online education. Early adopters swarmed sites and racked up web hits in the millions. But then there was a deafening silence. Commerce and media sites began closing down their discussion boards. Even busy boards like CNN's were shuttered. Was the online community movement dead? No, it was just transforming itself, settling down and maturing into a space where it had real value and applicability. The bottom line is that online community or online interaction is not the goal. It's one means for helping groups achieve their goals. It is not necessarily about "online community" but what conditions and process are needed to enable communities to use the online environment.

"The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services. Stephen Downes, the project leader:"

Introducing Edupunk The concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire. This post summarizes several recent posts and offers something like a definition (I would like to think that true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity): "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley's philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions. Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics--hands-on learning that starts with the learner's interests--and makes them relevant to today's digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely."

Nice discussion from the Networked Learning peeps (George Siemens, Stephen Downes) on whether learning networks can (partly) replace teachers.

"The mere promise of Google Wave inspired a rainbow of potential use cases, but Wave's best real-world use boils down to this: it helps a group get things done together. Here's how to manage a group project in Wave."

"It's no secret that web design is a fast-growing industry. Virtually every type of business is in need of a quality website. There are opportunities at the large agency level down to freelancers developing small-business websites from home. So how do you break into this exciting field? With little or no experience creating websites, getting yourself up to speed can be a daunting task. There are so many different avenues of design and development to explore. Which way should you go first? Which skill sets suit you the best? We aim to give you an overview of a few things things that are essential to a well-rounded knowledge of web design. These are starting-points, if you will. Below each item, we've listed additional resources for you to continue on in your learning process. Before we get into it, heed one important lesson: You can't become a professional web designer overnight. It takes years to reach an expert level in any aspect of the field. But everybody starts somewhere, and there's no better time than the present begin your web design education."

"As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs). The name brings to mind Etienne Wenger's pioneering work in observing naturally occurring use of virtual environments by engineers. The problem was that when people went from a researcher's description of what had grown naturally in the past to a prescriptive recipe, things went wrong. People never accurately report all the factors that lead to the success or failure of a project; retrospective coherence clicks in. Also, the fact that something worked once in a specific context does not mean that it will work again even in the same conditions, or that you can accurately replicate the starting conditions. The other big problem was that people built over structured, formal top-down systems that replicated the design methodologies for enterprisewide systems like SAP. So, let's look at a bottom-up, naturalizing approach to building communities for knowledge flow using blogs:"

Connectivism: A Theory of Personal Learning "

"July 27, 2010 Ten Factors that Determine Online Student Success at Community Colleges By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning * * * ShareThis Community colleges are especially prone to problems with student completion of courses and retention of the students to graduation. To assist these institutions in addressing problems of persistence among online students, Robert Knipe, dean of learning technologies at Genesee Community College, undertook a study with area colleagues to learn what factors are most critical in predicting success, with an eye to understanding which factors are in the college's control and which may predict a student at risk for failing to persist. Persistence is a key issue for community colleges because they tend to be driven by FTEs. These institutions are typically open admission, and maintaining a certain level of FTE determines the school's funding for the next year. To better understand online course persistence, Knipe contacted colleagues at area community colleges. "All [were] seeing about a 70 percent on-time completion rate, down from 80 percent," he says. However, most research done at that point on online student persistence focused on programs at the baccalaureate level. So, Knipe constructed a "Top Ten" list based on his research that helps community colleges understand when students are most at risk for not completing an online course."

By a "research talk" we mean a presentation of 30-60 minutes, given to a group of people who are motivated and intelligent, but who may not know much about your particular area. The paper is heavily on our personal experience of giving talks in the area of Computing Science. What we have to say is quite different from what business people are often taught, but perhaps that's due mainly to a difference in the style of presentation needed for technical material. Papers like this one often tend to consist mainly of "motherhood" statements, with which nobody could possibly disagree (such as "prepare well"), and thereby end up with little real punch. We have tried to avoid this, partly by deliberately overstating some things (the title, for example) in order to make our points more vividly. We make no claim to have all the answers; rather, we have simply tried to write down suggestions which have worked for us in the hope that they may be useful to you. Everyone is different, so take what is useful for you, and ignore the rest.

The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming."

"There has been lots of discussion this week about whether Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or Personal Learning Network (PLN) are the right terms to describe what this is all about and some recognition that this a semantics issue. According to Rita Kop PLE is a UK term and PLN an American term. Dave Cormier questions whether the term personal should be used at all. Stephen Downes points out that personal is an OK term if you think about [Personal Learning] Network as opposed to [Personal] Learning Network - and similarly for PLE. I like that - but for me, the words are not as important as the process - although I can see that the process needs nominalising for ease of reference. If I am going to think about introducing the idea of PLEs/PLNs to my colleagues or students then I will be talking about the process and the implications of this process for learning rather than what we should call it, i.e. why it might be preferable for students to learn in environments/spaces of their own choice rather than be confined to an institutions VLE/LMS."

Innovation in Online Higher Education Published November 14, 2008 Random... , Thinkses In an article in the Guardian a couple of days ago - UK universities should take online lead, it was reported that "UK universities should push to become world leaders in online higher education", with universities secretary, John Denham, "likely to call" for the development of a "global Open University in the UK". (Can you imagine how well that call went down here?;-) Anyway, the article gave me a heads-up about the imminent publication of a set of reports to feed into a Debate on the Future of Higher Education being run out of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

useful survey and comments on new govnt report on e learing from expert at the OU

Some of us on the Friends of Live Earth team recently had the opportunity to sit down with Charles Porch from ning, who gave some general pointers on network building best practices. Porch has worked with thousands of the 1.1 million communities now using the ning social community platform. So here's your quick jujitsu: 1) The network should have a purpose. It shouldn't be just a fan club, instead it should try to achieve something, and if it's a nonprofit have a clear call-to-action.

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.