Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

From the About page, "The mission of the Center for Teaching, as approved during the process of its creation, is to 'promote and support efforts to enhance instruction at The University of Iowa'"

I tagged Iowa's Center for Teaching in light of our naming centers for teaching as potential audiences for our work.

Considered a well-established e-COP for those interested in learning and technology (participants include ICT policy-makers, teachers, researchers, and commercial developers), the MirandaNet site shows a wide array of offerings, including publications, resources, professional development, and forums. MirandaMods, the group's version of the "unconference" is especially interesting.

I thought that this was an interesting group with an interesting website. Wondering if others of you are already familiar with this group and their work. I did see that one MirandaMod on CoP in teaching and learning included Etienne Wenger.

From the site, "FlashMeeting is an easy to use online meeting application, it allows a dispersed group of people to meet from anywhere in the world with an internet connection." It seems that, in addition to using FlashMeeting to facilitate the meeting, the site also posts an archive of the meeting, which you can point to from your own website.

This blog acts as the home home space for the online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, considered to be an early example of a MOOC. The course (and this blog) were developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, who co-facilitated the course. Using this interface, the course was offered in 2008 and 2009.

Excellent description of what we tried to start with first year of IL-SLI--now I know we are onto something!

I love this video--it gives me the terminology to explain this new age learning approach to IL teachers--orient, declare, network, cluster, focus--for the long trip and shorter side-trips.

a possible component of Guided Digital Environments

June 28 blog by Beth on social media measures. I like the emphasis on relationship building with the organization because a social learning communityis all about building respectful, caring, responsive partnerships on practice shared with others.

Title: Companies are Erecting In-House Social Networks, June 26, 2011, This article intrigued me from the get-go because: 1) it speaks to the desire for people to be connected socially in their work; 2) it provides forums (opportunities) for the distantly-connected worker(s)/network member(s) to 'trickle-up' by sharing innovative practice/ideas; 3) it resembles Facebook for its ease of participation and entry level; 4) it creates a social network, which is the beginning of conversation, which is the beginning of collaboration, no? :-) We know that high school students LOVE the SLI because it gives them the opportunity to meet and greet and sometimes talk about meaningful social justice issues. But the hook is social, then learning. We have been talking about trying Facebook this year to ease the way in for up to 200 kids, but many school districts do not allow students to access Facebook from school computers. Maybe we need to explore Yammer or Chatter or look to see if there is a comparable open source app?

Videos of the Learning Design Support Environment and the Online Pedagogical Pattern Data Collector on Vimeo

Jay Cross on why Learning is the New Work, 6/13/11. Brief timeline of how work used to be simple, then informational, then and now conceptual and how our educational systems have lagged behind in producing players ready to work in groups/collaboratives to get the right job done in the best way.

Blog by Josh Bernoff, December 11, 2007 on the POST method: A Systematic Approach to Social Strategy. POST stands for people, objectives, strategy, and technology, another way of organizing work instead of the 5 Ps (purpose, people, problem, product, and then process). Believe this is relevant to our course, too.