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Jackie Doherty

Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

Personal Learning Environments PLE Adult Learning personal environments learning

shared by Jackie Doherty on 26 May 11 - No Cached
  • Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems
  • However, in this same time period several other innovative technologies – peer to peer systems, weblogs, wikis, and social software – have at the same time been both widely adopted and used by a varied and diverse number of people, yet until very recently been marginalized, unsupported and even in some cases banned [6] within educational institutions, despite increasing conviction amongst some education technologists
  • The course-centric organizational model and the limits on learner's ability to organize the space combine to create a context which is greatly homogenous; all learners have the same experience of the system, see the same content, organized in the same fashion, with the same tools.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • This Page 3 Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems      3 contradicts the desire often expressed under the general heading of lifelong learning for an individualized experience tailored to personal needs and priorities
  • Most content within a VLE is not available to the outside world; it is also often unavailable to learners after they leave a course.
  • Typically a VLE makes it difficult to engage external organizations, and learners who are not registered in some fashion with the organization.
  • the PLE is concerned with enabling a wide range of contexts to be coordinated to support the goals of the user.
  • explicitly recognizes the need to integrate experiences in a range of environments, including education, work, and leisure activity
  • any user should be able to both consume and publish resources using a service, and user
  • s should be able to organize their resources, manage contexts, and adopt tools to suit their needs.
  • and it is no longer possible to focus solely on standards developed to suit the needs of the education sector.
  • Instead, systems will need to interact with services offering their own proprietary APIs (for example, Google Maps [11]) and with services offering interfaces that support more general web standards (for example, IETF Atom [12])
  • connection is far more critical than compliance, and it is far better to offer a wide range of services, requiring support for a range of standardization from formal standards through to fully proprietary (yet publicly available) APIs, than to restrict the connections possible to users
  • the PLE is concerned with sharing resources, not protecting them, and emphasizes the use of creative commons licenses [13] enabling editing, modification, and republishing of resources.
  • Rather than pre-packaged learning objects, the resources collected and accessed using the PLE are more typically weblog postings, reviews, comments, and other communication artifacts.
  • Whereas the VLE operates within an organizational scope, the PLE operates at a personal level in that it coordinates services and information that is related directly to its user and owner.
  • The user can connect their PLE with social networks, knowledge bases, work contexts, and learning contexts of any size to which they can obtain access.
  • Plug-in connectors for services
  • utilizing a range of machine-readable services
  • support the creation of new information and not just the aggregation of existing content, one of the major requirements of the PLE pattern
  • web APIs in a piecemeal, one-off fashion,
  • all the format conversion and protocol management needed to support the API, can be dynamically associated with an application, and can also encapsulate any provisioning or access control information needed to access a particular service
  • Flock enables connection to a range of services including social bookmarks, blogging, and notification
  • Flock
  • To support effective organization of information, mechanisms of flexible tagging should be combined with list creation and sharing facilities
  • Smart groups are used extensively in products such as iTunes [21] and enables organisation to structure itself based on simple user-provided rules
  • more value can be obtained by the user when the information of services is combined to enable sorting, filtering and searching
  • ather than relying on services to offer a very detailed set of metadata using a common profile, systems will instead need to offer greater capability for managing either heterogeneous information or operate on a very limited set of information which can be commonly assumed, such as titles, summaries, and tag
  • While the contexts of formal education systems can be characterized as having bounded variety (e.g., a course typically has around 20-2000 members) and possessing rigid boundaries, general social systems used in informal learning can possess more diverse levels of variety
  • Connecting with very large contexts using a PLE poses both a technical and a usability challenge, as it will not be possible to absorb all the information within the context into an environment to be operated upon locally, nor is it feasible to present users with flat representations of contexts when they contain thousands of resources
  • ilter the context to reduce the amount of visible users and resources based on the declared interest of the user.
  • it remains unclear what mechanisms can underpin the coordination of collective actions by groups and teams within a PLE.
  • the PLE is not a single piece of software, but instead the collection of tools used by a user to meet their needs as part of their personal working and learning routine
  • the characteristics of the PLE design may be achieved using a combination of existing devices (laptops, mobile phones, portable media devices), applications (newsreaders, instant messaging clients, browsers, calendars) and services (social bookmark services, weblogs, wikis) within what may be thought of as the practice of personal learning using technology
  • TenCompetenc
  • So how will the PLE and the VLE design co-exist
  • whereby VLE products start to open their services for use within the PLE.
  • LE are incorporated into the VLE, yet along the way robbing them of some of their transformative power.
  • The VLE is by no means dead, and those with investments in this technology will attempt to co-opt new developments into the design in order to prolong its usefulness
  • PLE model will develop in sophistication, making the VLE a less attractive option, particularly as we move into a world of lifelong, lifewide, informal and work-based learnin
  • Within the field of education technology, the focus in recent years has been on the improvement of the technology of the virtual learning environment (VLE, also known as a Learning Management System, or LMS) with software and techniques that do not fit the general pattern of capabilities of a VLE being largely marginalized
Tyler Wall

6 Reasons Why Tablets Are Ready for the Classroom - 1 views

mashable.com/...tablets-education

tablets education

shared by Tyler Wall on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • Tyler Wall on 17 May 11
     
    6 Reasons Why Tablets Are Ready for the Classroom
Jackie Doherty

McElvaney - 0 views

www.cjlt.ca/...257

shared by Jackie Doherty on 28 May 11 - Cached
  • Weaving a Personal Web: Using online technologies to create customized, connected, and dynamic learning environments
  • This paper explores how personal web technologies (PWTs) can be used by learners and the relationship between PWTs and connectivist learning principles
  • With these tools, individuals can create and manage personal learning environments (PLEs) and personal learning networks (PLNs), which have the potential to become powerful resources for academic, professional, and personal development
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Free and easy-to-use technologies offer new ways to find, organize, create, and interact with information.
  • The 2009 Horizon Report defines personal webs as "customized, personal web-based environments . . . that explicitly support one's social, professional, [and] learning . . . activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world" (Johnson, Levine & Smith, 2009, p. 19), and heralds them as an emerging learning trend.
  • This paper explores personal web technologies (PWTs) and their learning applications. Examples are given of commonly used, customizable technologies such as: social bookmarking, personal publishing tools, aggregators, and metagators.
  • learning needs extend far beyond the culmination of a training session or degree program. Working adults must continually update their skills and behaviours to conform to the constantly changing demands of the workplace (Lewis & Romiszowski, 1996)
  • some needs may best be addressed by the individual him/herself.
  • PLE) to manage their own learning resources; whether these are wikis, news feeds, podcasts, or people.
  • The use of PWTs for learning directly supports several principles of connectivism, a learning theory outlined by Siemens (2006): (i) Knowledge rests in networks, (ii) Knowledge may reside in non-human appliances, and learning is enabled / facilitated by technology, and (iii) Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities (p. 31).
  • If individuals can sufficiently develop their ability to find, organize, and manage these connections, their available knowledge does not have to be limited by the confines of their own skulls.
  • To navigate the Internet more efficiently, individuals can assemble a virtual toolbox from an ever-growing list of free, and often open-source, technologies to aid in aggregating, organizing, and publishing information online.
  • To create a personal web for learning, it is first necessary to explore what personal web technologies are, where to find them, and how to use them.
  • Social bookmarking and research tools allow users to save web pages, articles, and other media (usually to an online storage location) and organize them in personally meaningful ways.
  • n general, the length and full-featured capabilities of blogging offer learners the opportunity to explore topics in depth and reflect, while the speed and simplicity of micro-blogging lends itself more towards posing questions and collaborative brainstorming (King, 2009).
  • esides enriching and enlivening a post, these tools make it possible for an individual to publish artifacts that are ill-served by text-only displays.
  • Micro-blogs, such as Twitter (twitter.com), allow users to post short messages from their computer or mobile phone.
  • Users can also 'follow' other members to receive a stream of their posts.
  • asily "ask and answer questions, learn from experts, share resources, and react to events on the fly"
  • ndividuals who follow multiple blogs and/or regularly visit news or media sites may find juggling the disparate streams of information overwhelming. For this reason, it can be helpful to subscribe to these streams (or “feeds”) by using an aggregator.
  • Metagators, also called portals or start pages, can aggregate feeds, social networks, and widgets to create a central, personalized location for an individual's Internet usage
  • Netvibes and iGoogle
  • Widgets are small, adaptable, programmable, web-based gadgets that can be embedded into a variety of sites or used on mobile phones or desktops (
  • Due to the fact that they are user-created, there is no exact definition of a PLE (PLE, n.d.). In general, a PLE is the sum of websites and technologies that an individual makes use of to learn.
  • PLEs may range in complexity from a single blog to an inter-connected web of social bookmarking tools, personal publishing platforms, search engines, social networks, aggregators, etc.
  • http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Ple
  • Once an individual creates a PLE or PLN, there is no need to sit in front of a computer to access it. The majority of PWTs have mobile-friendly versions available, allowing individuals to take their learning to go.
  • Instead of limiting learning to traditional environments, mobile versions of PWTs give learners more options on where and when to learn.
  • However, there is a catch: PWTs may clash with traditional, linear, teacher-centered instruction (see Figure 2)
  • Learners who use PWTs must learn to question sources, verify information, compare and contrast various perspectives and become more independent
  • need to focus on building critical media and information literacy skills, so that students can effectively navigate the online maze and avoid being fooled by false or misleading information.
  • students have already experimented with a personal web technology, such as social networking, but, "few of them are being taught how to leverage its potential and benefit from the deep learning that can ensue"
  • In higher education, PWTs could be of great use for researching, developing PLNs, and creating online portfolios.
  • An undergraduate student who uses a research tool such as Zotero will graduate with a searchable, organized collection of annotated resources that could be valuable in the workplace or in future academic undertakings.
  • As the individual becomes increasingly connected to their PLN, they may become increasingly disconnected to those who are physically around them, such as family and friends
  • Using PWTs to incessantly check for new articles, status updates, and activity may become a drain on one’s attention and productivity
  • Valuable or innovative ideas put forth by lesser-known individuals can easily become lost in the noise.
  • ndividuals who wish to learn from their personal network must strive to create a diverse PLN populated with voices that may dissent, challenge, or provoke. Otherwise, the PLN cannot foster critical and creative thinking,
  • anything they publish on the Internet may be found by supervisors, peers, teachers, a
  • uture hiring managers (Harris, 2007)
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