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I can become a better photographer simply by the sheer act of continually doing photography… heading towards the idea of 10,000 hours at doing something can get you near the “Welcome to Expertise” sign. This seems simple- I get better at something by doing it. There is no central authority, no entity that is approving what I do. If I skip a day or more, there is no punishment. It is not based on attendance. I get out what I put into it. I’m really on my own. That’s is as Personal as the Learning Environment can be, eh? But I am not completely on my own… and what I think is a key ingredient here is the feedback I get by being in a network of peers doing the same thing. It is the comments, suggestions, and even small reinforcements that others doing the same activity as me that increase or reinforce my learning, not a teacher’s.

1. The longest path is the shortest and the shortest path is the longest Essentially, if you are looking for shortcuts to learning , your end path will take more time and effort. At first the path of learning all of the basic concepts seems like a long route, but in the end, the authors argue will be shorter in the long run. 2. Avoid isolation. This not only means find online communities, but also people you can talk to or bounce ideas off of. It’s the “Learning is social” concept –“As a self-learner, you do not have the convenience of scheduled class time and required problem sets. You must be aggressive about finding people to help you.” 3. Avoid multitasking It does not mean you cannot study with music playing (I am listening to a blues show as I type) but it is important to focus solely on trying to learn a task or complete a project. 4. You don’t read textbooks, you work through them It ain’t a novel and need not be read cover to cover, or even chapter start to end- “Successful self-learners don’t read, they toil. If there are proofs, walk them through, and try proving results on your own. Work through exercises, and make up your own examples.” It’s more like exercising than reading. 5. Build Eigencourses I cannot define “eigencourse” but to me it says leverage the open content that is out there. The “eigen” part seems to mean its not all in one place, you will need to pick and choose, mix and mashup. Don;t expect a single course pack. 6. What to do when you don’t understand. This point was a bit more vague to me and aimed more at learning to code, but the idea of a “logic tree” tells me there are patterns of ways to figure out how to step back and sort out what you need to learn something you don’t get at first. Maybe it should read, “DON’T PANIC”? 7. There is nothing so practical as a good theory. The authors here suggest to not be a “theoretician” or a “practitioner” but both. “Not all textbooks can be read with application in mind, despite that they serve as the theoretical foundation for applied work. This is why you must have a deep sense of patience and commitment – which is why a prolonged curiosity and passion for a topic are so valuable… Avoid the dualistic mistakes of technical execution without intuition, and intuition without technical execution.”

data from a course management system that captured time spent in specific interaction activities

We found that learner-learner interaction was significantly, but negatively, associated with course completion rates. Learner-faculty interaction and enrollment size were not significantly related to course completion.

Second, Rungtusanatham and colleagues (2004) proposed that higher level courses (e.g. MBA level) require more interaction levels; introductory courses need little interaction. Our sample consisted of community college courses. Do they require higher levels of interaction when the content may not need interpretation or further analysis? Arbaugh and Rau (2007) posited that even graduate course faculty should not necessarily push high levels of learner-learner interaction.

course home page

gradebook and email

authors’ sample consisted of community college courses, so perhaps they do not need higher levels of interaction because the content may not need interpretation or further analysis

The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

I’ve come to realize that it’s very important for my students to encounter a concept before fully understanding what’s going on. It makes their brain try to fill in the gaps, and the more churn a brain experiences, the more likely it’s going to retain information

I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.

we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.

the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?

The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."