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it is not clear that an outcomes driven system is what students require; many valuable skills and aptitudes – art appreciation, for example – are not identifiable as an outcome. This becomes evident when we consider how learning is to be measured. In traditional learning, success is achieved not merely by passing the test but in some way being recognized as having achieved expertise. A test-only system is a coarse system of measurement for a complex achievement.

The products of our conversations are as concrete as test scores and grades. (Ryan, 2007) But, as the result of a complex and interactive process, they are much more complex, allowing not only for the measurement of learning, but also for the recognition of learning. As it becomes easier to simply see what a student can accomplish, the idea of a coarse-grained proxy, such as grades, will fade to the background.

Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.RSS and related specifications will be one of the primary ways Personal Learning Environments connect with remote systems. To use a PLE will be essentially to immerse oneself in the flow of communications that constitutes a community of practice in some discipline or domain on the internet.

In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)

place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question.

As it becomes more and more possible to teach oneself online, and even to demonstrate one’s achievement through productive membership in a community of practice, there will be greater demand for a formalized system of recognition, a way for people to demonstrate their competence in an area without having to go through a formal program of study in the area.

the major shift in instructional technology will be from systems centered on the educational institution to systems centered on the individual learner.

rather than the employment of a single system to accomplish all educational tasks, both instructors and learners will use a variety of different tools in combination with each other.

Automation allows us to more easily create and present content, to more easily form groups and collaborate, to more easily give tests and take surveys. This frees instructors to perform tasks that have been traditionally more difficult and time consuming – to relate to students on a personal basis, to offer coaching and moral support, to learn about and analyze a student’s inclinations and understandings.

We are not only what we read

We are how we read

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Good online facilitation depends on good online communication skills.

This course

is designed to help both formal and informal learners access and interpret models, research and professional dialog in the facilitation of online communities.

After completing this course people should be confident in facilitating online and/or be able to critique and offer advice to other people in the facilitation of online communities.

Facilitation is a rare and valuable skill to have.

In this course we will be looking for online communities in very different places.

It is important that we try and develop an understanding of what exactly we are looking for, and techniques for looking.

choose any or all of the recommended tags for your bookmarks.

you could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan"

there are no better tags than others.

we should agree on a special tag for the group like "LWC" that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged.

Organizing tags in topics or bundles

CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags

plural forms for countable nouns.

Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators

awareness-raising,

are means of raising awareness

wondering if there're any shortcut suggestions to 'attacking' the project of revisiting and tagging them?

I've been tagging many things both ESOL and ESL (because I don't know if diigo would automatically search for both. Is there a way to find out ?

we're moving from just collecting resources to a more engaged collective way of making the best out of the resources we share with the group.

the power of folksonomies is exactly having everybody tagging as much as possible, with as much key-words as you can think of. We won't ever be able to create a true "system"

agging for personal use x tagging for public good

Tagging will always be ambiguous because our very personal ways of classifying things and making them useful for us. Even so, with folksonomies, we're able to see the latest trends in a determined group or about a certain topic, we can go to places never imagined before.

http://k12learning20.wikispaces.com/.

e-learning

e-teaching, e-learning, networking, workshop, web

"prof. development"

difference between tags and categories

web2.0, wiki, professional_development, technology, edtech

e-learninge-learninge-teachingedtechnetworkingprof. developmentprofessional_developmenttechnologyweb2.0web2.0wikiworkshop

ProDev

web2.0, wikis, education, learning, teaching, ProDev, k-12

networking

I tend to use underscores and plurals, as well as one word tags, like professionaldevelopment, though I agree with Paul that ProfDev would make sense

I need to be more consistent.

The] "Lists" [function] provides another great way to organize bookmarks, a way that is complementary to tagging

Despite the tendency to shut ourselves away and sit in Rodinesque isolation when we have to learn, learning is a remarkably social process. Social groups provide the resources for their members to learn.

Learning and Identity Shape One Another

Bruner, with his idea of learning to be, and Lave and Wenger, in their discussion of communities of practice, both stress how learning needs to be understood in relation to the development of human identity.

In learning to be, in becoming a member of a community of practice, an individual is developing a social identity.

So, even when people are learning about, in Bruner's terms, the identity they are developing determines what they pay attention to and what they learn. What people learn about, then, is always refracted through who they are and what they are learning to be.

In either case, the result, as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson puts it neatly, is "a difference that makes a difference". 29 The importance of disturbance or change makes it almost inevitable that we focus on these.

So to understand the whole interaction, it is as important to ask how the lake is formed as to ask how the pebble got there. It's this formation rather than information that we want to draw attention to, though the development is almost imperceptible and the forces invisible in comparison to the drama and immediacy of the pebble. It's not, to repeat once more, the information that creates that background. The background has to be in place for the information to register.

The forces that shape the background are, rather, the tectonic social forces, always at work, within which and against which individuals configure their identity. These create not only grounds for reception, but grounds for interpretation, judgment, and understanding.

A Brief Note on the "Social"

It took Karl Marx to point out, however, that Crusoe is not a universal. On his island (and in Defoe's mind), he is deeply rooted in the society from which he came

Jean-Paul Sartre

We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe . . . . [T]he waiter plays with his condition in order to realize it

So while people do indeed learn alone, even when they are not stranded on desert islands or in small cafes, they are nonetheless always enmeshed in society, which saturates our environment, however much we might wish to escape it at times.

For the same reason, however, members of these networks are to some degree divided or separated from people with different practices. It is not the different information they have that divides them.

Rather, it is their different attitudes or dispositions toward that information -- attitudes and dispositions shaped by practice and identity -- that divide. Consequently, despite much in common, physicians are different from nurses, accountants from financial planners.

two types of work-related networks

First, there are the networks that link people to others whom they may never get to know but who work on similar practices. We call these "networks of practice"

Second, there are the more tight-knit groups formed, again through practice, by people working together on the same or similar tasks. These are what, following Lave and Wenger, we call "communities of practice".

Networks of Practice

The 25,000 reps working for Xerox make up, in theory, such a network.