Due:  Part 1, Wednesday, Week 3 Part 2, Sunday, Week 4 Grade: 120 points Individual Task Integrated Instructional Strategies: Learners create content (UGC; Participatory Web; Remix); Learners share content (Collaborative learning; Social content sharing; Social Networking); Learners manage content (Linkage; Aggregation); Learners access content (Mobile learning; Cloud Computing) Submission: Delicious, Google

You will be reading The Great Plant Esacape. The information is broken down into "cases." Each case has different assignments.

*Make sure* to summarize the information from your research in your own words. It is not appropriate to copy and paste text to your web page from another source. Any direct quotes MUST BE listed within quotations marks and properly sited. The final collaborative website will be publically accessible and thus must follow copyright and fair use guidelines and may not contain plagiarized materials.

Epistemological Frameworks for Learning Siemens (2008b, p. 9) draws on the work of Driscoll in categorizing learning “into three broad epistemological frameworks” namely objectivism, pragmatism, and interpretivism.  According to objectivism, reality is external to the mind, and knowledge and perception are experientially acquired.  Pragmatism suggests that knowledge is a negotiation between reflection and experience, inquiry and action, and interpretivism posits that knowledge is an internal construction and is informed through socialization and cultural cues. A fourth framework is also introduced, namely Downes’ (2006) theory of distributed knowledge, which is supported by Siemens (2008b) who sees “. . . the view of knowledge as composed of connections and networked entities …The concept of emergent, connected, and adaptive knowledge provides the epistemological framework for connectivism as a learning theory” (p. 10).  Siemens sees the alignment between epistemologies and learning theories as detailed in Figure 1. Figure 1.  Alignment of Epistemologies and Learning Theories 

Downes and Siemens do not suggest that connectivism is limited to the online environment.  The online environment is one application that has been important for the development of connectivism, but the theory applies to a larger learning environment, and helps to inform how we understand our relatedness to the world, and consequently how we learn and understand from it.