"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."

"Welcome to the Virtual Training Suite - a set of free Internet tutorials to help you develop Internet research skills for your university course. All of the tutorials are written and reviewed by a national team of lecturers and librarians from universities across the UK. These interactive, teach-yourself tutorials take around an hour to complete. Simply work through the material in your own time at your own pace."

"The UDL Guidelines are organized according to the three main principles of UDL that address representation, expression, and engagement. For each of these areas, specific "Checkpoints" for options are highlighted, followed by examples of practical suggestions. In addition, Examples and Resources to guide implementation as well as a listing of the Research Evidence are offered for every checkpoint. Like UDL itself, these Guidelines are flexible and should be mixed and matched into the curriculum as appropriate. The UDL Guidelines are not meant to be a "prescription" but a set of strategies that can be employed to overcome the barriers inherent in most existing curricula. They may serve as the basis for building in the options and the flexibility that are necessary to maximize learning opportunities for all students. Educators may find that they are already incorporating many of these guidelines into their practice."

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"About Critical Pedagogy on the Web This site has a dual focus, providing both a general overview of critical pedagogy--its definitions, history, key concepts, and major theorists--and links to other critical pedagogy resources on the web. It began as a final project for an independent study in educational theory in the Fall of 2002."

"The Freire Project is dedicated to building an international critical community which works to promote social justice in a variety of cultural contexts. We are committed to conducting and sharing critical research in social, political, and educational locations."

"How to Create A Facebook Page Facebook pages have been getting lots of search engine respect lately. Learn how to create a Facebook page here, since it's rather difficult to figure out how to do it on your own as a newbie! It's 2010, and I've completely updated this tutorial...enjoy :)"

"In January I published an artcile entitled 'Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning?' in the second edition of e-Learning Papers, a new journal published by elearningeuropa. The online journal subsequently invited readers to ask me questions about the paper. Very fine questions they were too. I have just got round to answering the answers will no doubt appear on the elearningeuropa portal shortly. "

"Call for submissions for the ECE Conference Creativity and Engagement in Higher Education Submissions are invited for the 6th Education in a Changing Environment Conference to be held at the University of Salford, 6 - 8 July 2011. There are two formats for submissions : full papers and abstracts. Within the abstract category there are a variety of different presentation types. Conference Theme Full papers and abstracts are invited which explore Creativity and Engagement in Higher Education across one of the following themes: * Social Media: Papers and abstracts are sought that explore how social media can be used to facilitate, engage, support or deliver learning * Learning, Teaching and Assessment: Papers and abstracts are sought that offer insights into creative ways of facilitating learning, teaching and assessment and enabling engagement with students * Networking and Partnerships: Papers and abstracts are sought that address engagement and creativity with external partners. Partners may include other universities, other countries, and employers. This may include research in organisational learning and in work related learning. "

"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:"

"We believe the time has come to broaden the traditional approach to leadership and decision making and form a new perspective based on complexity science. (For more on this, see the sidebar "Understanding Complexity.") Over the past ten years, we have applied the principles of that science to governments and a broad range of industries. Working with other contributors, we developed the Cynefin framework, which allows executives to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problems and opportunities. (Cynefin, pronounced ku-nev-in, is a Welsh word that signifies the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand.) Using this approach, leaders learn to define the framework with examples from their own organization's history and scenarios of its possible future. This enhances communication and helps executives rapidly understand the context in which they are operating."

"The Cognitive Edge Network is evolving a series of open source methods based on naturalising sense-making through the Method Development Cycle. The full list of methods can be accessed here. The Method Template is designed to provide some guidance to users of the Cognitive Edge Wiki and also a cut and paste capability to assist in setting up a new page. In general the following principles should be followed: 1. Consistency: should be consistent with the principles of naturalising sense-making. In other words it should avoid idealistic approaches based on defining future states rather than enabling evolution 2. Minimalism: a method template should contain the essence of the method and should be written so that a practitioner can quickly glance through the sheet (especially the work flow) during use without the need to navigate through a large amount of text. 3. Use HTML: additional material, illustrations, detailed check lists, supporting documents, action forms or whatever can also be stored as files or as new articles and then referenced from the method document. 4. Object based: methods should be descrete items, which can easily be combined with other methods. As such they should be codified at a level which allows that. Assemblies can be written up as Offerings 5. Non-specificity: as far as possible do not make the method description specific to a particular application area or industry sector. If there is a good example of the application then create a new article and create a link to that article 6. Avoid recipes: the Cognitive Edge method is object based, it is not a recipe. We expect adaption in context. Methods should therefore not read like recipes, or encourage people to repeat past practice. The method document is an original from which context specific practice can be developed. "

"Welcome to Roundhouse, a student-led journal at the University of Leeds. Roundhouse has been discursively edited, peer reviewed and developed by Critical Theory students from the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Leeds. The seminal edition of the Roundhouse journal showcases nine articles from recent graduates examining the 'applied turn' in Critical Theory along with an editorial statement of principles and is available from this page in the left-hand sidebar."

"Welcome to Quality Matters Quality Matters (QM) is a nationally recognized, faculty-centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online courses and online components. Colleges and universities across the country use the tools in developing, maintaining and reviewing their online courses and in training their faculty. "

"This is a true story. Professor "Jones" decides to experiment with a blog in his class. It takes him about 10 minutes to set up a free site using Blogger. He then watches students engage in lively discussions of case studies outside of class, and tweaks the blog as experience teaches him how best to use the system. Teaching with Technology column Thinking that others might want to add a blog to their class as well, he goes to IT and offers to lead workshops for faculty on blogging in higher education. A few weeks later he is informed by IT that they have not only rejected his proposal, but that he is in violation of university policy and must stop immediately. Professor Jones asks what university policy he has violated, and is told that the policy has not yet been created, but will be soon. Professor Jones asks how he could possibly have violated a policy that does not yet exist. Soon afterward the IT department announces a new initiative to implement blogging at the institution. A committee is formed, and after nearly a year of deliberation they choose to pay for a system-rather than adopt a free, readily available system-because it allows for centralized control. IT sends out an email announcing the new system, along with a text document outlining a long list of policies that strictly limit how it may be used. No one adopts the system, leading IT to complain that faculty do not want to use technology in their teaching."

"One of the biggest problems with doing group projects online (and face-to-face) is student resistance, says Jan Engle, coordinator of instruction development at Governors State University. "One of the best ways to overcome resistance is obviously for students to have a positive experience. Unfortunately, many of them come into an online class having had a very negative experience with group work. Almost always, those negative experiences stem from problems where they've been on teams where they ended up doing most of the work and other people did nothing and everybody got the same grade," Engle says. "

"It's not always easy to differentiate between critical pedagogy, active learning, and the learner- or learning-centered approaches. Each is predicated on the notion of student engagement and proposes involvement via such strategies as collaborative and cooperative learning and problem-based learning. All recommend a move away from lecturing. Critical pedagogy is the most extreme of the three and has some unique characteristics. The authors below describe its basic tenets as eradication of the teacher-student contradiction "whereby the teacher teaches and the students are taught; the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; the teacher talks and the students listen; and the teacher is the subject and the students are mere objects." (p. 26) Critical pedagogy also has a political agenda; it views education as a means to achieve social justice and change."

"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."

"Twitter in the College Classroom: Engaging Students 140 Characters at a Time By: Mary Bart in Trends in Higher Education * * * ShareThis If it seems like everyone is tweeting these days, it's not just your imagination. In 2007 Twitter users, as a whole, made about 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 the number had increased to 300,000 per day, before growing to 2.5 million per day in January 2009. Just one year later, in January 2010, the figure jumped to 50 million tweets per day. I think that is what people mean by the phrase "hockey stick growth." Despite its rapid growth, however, Twitter can be a bit puzzling to someone on the outside looking in. With its quirky lingo, written (and unwritten) rules, and very real potential for being a classroom distraction, some instructors feel Twitter is a can of worms that's better left unopened. And yet, as an educator, you can't help but be curious to see what all the fuss is about, not to mention the desire to add something new to your student engagement toolbox. For more content like this, be sure to download the FREE REPORT: Distance Learning Administration and Policy: Strategies for Achieving Excellence In an effort to demystify the Twitter universe for faculty considering leveraging the power of the micro-blogging platform in the classroom, Kerry Ramsay, a professor at Loyalist College, presented a seminar on Using Twitter to Enhance Collaborative Learning."