Group items tagged

A look at how an organization shares and uses knowledge, builds collaboration and innovation by using informal communities of interest. The paper looks at characteristics of CoP's, particularly with one group, and identifies how these characteristics can be transferrable to others.

This article is helping me see how if I were to create a Venn diagram of these two concepts, there would be some overlap. Keep in mind, the article was crafted in 1996, which I think adds strength to it because it is not clouded with current conventional ways of communication. I can see the points Panitz brings out where cooperative learning is much like how I was taught to teach science. We have groups, most likely created by me, and each member of the group plays a role. In more recent years (like the last 15 or so), there has been more of a push for inquiry which emphasizes putting control in the students' hands. Let the students decide the outcome (collaborative) as opposed to the teacher knowing what the outcome will be (cooperative). In my later years of teaching I was striving toward bringing in as much inquiry as possible, but even in 2010 I found students still molded into vessels who thought the job of the teacher was to fill them.

This paper considers the case of one mid-sized international company and how it built a community of practice. It looks at different strategies and their effects on communities of practice and on global distribution of knowledge and then suggest areas to look at for further study. One such area for further research is to look into seeing how to link multiple communities of practice so that sharing can be more global.

This paper looks at the patterns that emerge in the use of Personal Learning Networks. It tries to define language that is useful in considering these patterns.

This paper argues that using Personal Learning Environments (PLE-these are functionally equivalent to PLNs) self regulation is important. Because the use of PLEs are based on individual goals and actions the use of behavior which proves effective at reaching goals is important. They then suggest a framework for self regulated learning when using PLEs.

Stephen Downes's paper on knowledge contains insights about many topics, including the types of knowledge, emergence (the idea that some knowledge comes through connections between events, actors, or things), and knowledge distribution. Downes flagrantly displays his cognitive bias in his offhand dismissal of political conspiracies when discussing physicality, but makes many interesting and thought provoking points.

This is a paper that considers the design issues of supporting emergent knowledge from communities of users. It considers these challenges from a theoretical point of view and from the perspective of information systems. It posits principles such as 'Design for Customer Engagement by Seeking Out Naive Users' and 'Design for Knowledge Translation Through Radical Iteration with Functional Prototypes'.

This is a summary of a connectivist way of thinking in the learning environment and their learning theories of why it works.

The article offers an explanation of what a networked student model and a networked teacher model would look like. With the examples, it is suggested that these models could assist instructors in developing personal learning networks that provide the students with many opportunities to learn from many different sources.

In this article, the authors explore how PLEs, social media, and self regulated connect. Also introduces a pedagogical framework to for social media to support self-regulated learning

This article discusses how the use of formal and informal education can mesh. It talks about the importance of self-regulation in terms of connection to social media and how it can impact learning. It gives examples of how different media can be used in learning and enhance the PLN.

This paper is most useful for the discussion of how social media can help students develop self regulated learning skills in a PLE. A useful table is near the end of the article showing how teaches can use social media at 3 different levels of complexity for knowledge management.

Gives students a piece of virtual graph paper. When student clicks on a cell, they can type in numbers, math operations and equations. Everything is automatically aligned to be clear and legible.

This paper reviews and relates the connections between learning theories commonly associated with constructivist education. These theories include active learning pedagogies, experiential learning, anchored instruction, situated cognition, activity theory, authentic learning, and connectivism. With the advance of active and connected learning pedagogies, the author recognizes the need for a system to effectively apply the theories through education technology design and teaching practices. I found the article a great review of the research and work done to define these different theories and instructional methods. As I am noticing with each article, this author attests to the need for further work and research required to organize these theories into a useful framework for educational technology projects and activities

Connectivism is controversial as a learning theory. Many people don't see it as one of the majors like behaviorism, cognitivism, or constructivism but those 3 are falling short in terms of describing what is happening in the digital age. Connectivism can be described as distributed learning or using information outside of your primary knowledge. The author thinks that connectivism should be the new constructivism.

This paper defines PLE's and PLN's and creates a model for social teachers' presence optimization. It does this after a literature review and analyzing survey results about teachers' use of online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Results suggest there is potential for personal and professional development of educators through these networks.

I thought that this personal learning network resource was a great fit for our class. This article discusses how schools are using social media to engage students and real-world relevance, for professional development, and school, district, and teacher collaboration. They used Twitter to document and share a paper tower challenge with schools and teachers from all over the world. Twitter was used to connect with experts and students got to see that not all scientists agree on certain topics. They also connected with the community.

I like that this article looks at how Twitter can be used for students and for educators. The idea of Twitter for educators as professional development fits very well with the ideas of COP's and PLN's. While I haven't been a true part yet of a structured Twitter session for PD, I have lurked in many formal PD discussions with hashtags for our public school system and benefitted from what I gleaned.

What an awesome video. It makes me excited to go back in August and really challenge myself to use Twitter or Facebook to showcase my students. Our school district uses a hashtag #bsdpride for teachers to showcase things going on around the district and it's starting to take off. It's awesome that teachers are encouraging each other to use Twitter and begin challenges that involve students. You can tell from this video how important these students feel when their work or projects re used on social media, and are getting attention from other schools.