WomensLearningStudio

I saw this debate this morning and engaged with the topic and format. I like this way of presenting different perspectives on a hot-button issue and would like to experiment with it in WLStudio.

a collaborative editing tool, May 2012

Blog by Harold Jarche, April 30, 2012. This excerpt IMO justifies why women (and everyone else!) needs to know how to work in social networks to learn and to help others learn and apply their "capacity for action" in their workplaces and elsewhere. They can transform their workplaces through enriched learning practices. They may not have the HR title but they can still role model organizational learning on a small scale at least. Excerpt: "Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant, as work is almost never done by one person alone. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams and mostly by networks of people. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks." Excerpt: It shows that the company never gave any thought to organizational learning. ■Are employees narrating their work in a transparent environment? ■Does the daily routine support social learning? ■Is time made available for reflection and sharing stories? "Narrating their work in a transparent environment," "support social learning," and "reflection" are all linked to other resources.

Blog by Harold Jarche, Life in Perpetual Beta, April 30, 2012 Love this story of how blogging changed his life for the better.

Blog by John Hagel reviewing new book, Design in Nature, by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane, looks like it was published in January 2012. As a systems person, this review resonates with me and speaks to what the WLStudio can do to help women redesign their learning systems as well as the currents that flow through their systems. They must avoid others who wish to dictate where and what and how learning opportunities are available to them. Reworded more constructively, women need to design and nuture their own learning opportunities. Excerpts from review: The book introduces us to constructal law: "For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it." The authors caution "that nothing operates in isolation; every flow system is part of a bigger flow system, shaped by and in service to the world around it." "As the title of the book suggests, the constructal law is ultimately a law about design. It determines which designs will survive and thrive over time. The constant interplay between flow and design drives the evolution of flow systems. The design of flow systems must evolve to enhance the flows within the system or they will die." Final excerpt from book review: The bottom line So, what does this mean for all of us? The message is simple and compelling. If we are not enhancing flow, we will be marginalized, both in our personal and professional life. If we want to remain successful and reap the enormous rewards that can be generated from flows, we must continually seek to refine the designs of the systems that we spend time in to ensure that they are ever more effective in sustaining and amplifying flows. As the authors observe, "it is not love or money that makes the world go round but flow and design"

Jarche blogs on Models, flows, and exposure, April 27, 2012. Please scroll down to the bottom to see Doonesbury cartoon that challenges the benefits of "exposure" for doing unpaid work.

Article in MindShift, KQED, April 24, 2012 by Nathan Miton. Fabulous because it recognizes that content is one leg of learning stool. Excerpt: But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content. Endorsement of peer learning potential Excerpt: The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to. The exponential explosion in opportunities for learning. Excerpt: in the past 10 years I've heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I've never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago." A new breed of digital pedagogy/andragogy/heutagogy Excerpt: "We probably haven't fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches," Carson said. "The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model."

How crowdsourcing is impacting scientific research, and how blogging about scientific findings is changing how information about new discoveries gets supported/debunked. Interesting in the social media crowdsourcing aspect of how information is not in the hands of just experts anymore.

CrowdSourcing is changing the power dynamics of scientific information. Interesting article for the power of blogging and commenting vs professionals and scientific community.

Today's Tampa Bay Times, May 7, 2012 on free online learning. Names at least three different places to learn online: Khan Academy, TED, Academic EArth, and Instructables.

Use engaging videos on TED-Ed to create customized lessons. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube.

Brain Pickings, blog by Maria Popova, master curator, March 9, 2012 Extremely interesting blog on discovering information on the internet and sharing it with others.

5 minute interview by Brooke Gladstone with Maria Popova on NPR, March 23, 2012 on Maria's suggested curator's code. Don't know that her symbols are the best way to attribute stumbling across interesting writings that lead one to the source of various ideas (since as a comment pointed out below, the symbols don't appear on our keyboards). But it does argue for a consistent way of acknowledging the paths/combinations one goes through to build a map linking together concepts/ideas/new variations to readers/learners.

Beth Kanter's scoop.it curation on information coping skills, a skill we all need. Look at model for "how do you manage your information?" This process is part of designing and sustaining a personal learning environment.

How the Golden Years Disappeared by Marc Freedman, Salon, April 2, 2012. This is an excerpt from the Big Shift, a book written by Marc Freedman, the man who started Civic Ventures about 10 years ago. Perhaps the WLStudio takes on this social imperative and this is how we get funding? "The new migration is across time and the life course, as tens of millions (8,000 a day, one every ten seconds, are turning sixty) reach the spot where middle age used to end and old age once began, the new territory where a resurgent purpose gap, and gulf in identity, stands. Opportunity is there as well. The surge of people into this new stage of life is one of the most important social phenomena of the new century. Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and the capacity to do something significant with it. That's the gift of longevity, the great potential payoff on all the progress we've made in extending lives. Realizing these possibilities will require the courage to break from old and familiar patterns that once were our friends but just don't work any longer. It means considering ideas like "gap years" for grown ups, new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond midlife, remodelling higher education to help retrain people who have been working for 40 or 50 years, even the creation of new kinds of investment accounts to help cover the costs of transitioning to new careers. What we're facing is not a solo matter; it's a social imperative, an urgent one that must be solved as the great midlife migration gathers scale and momentum."

Blog post by Jenny Mackness on April 24, 2012 announcing a MOOC on First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, #fslt12, running from 5/21 to 6/22. Raises issues of how to engage with learners who may not be well-grounded in technology yet who might want to participate because of content, finding the right balance. Will offer certificate for "assessed" learners. Excerpt: "This is an exciting but rather daunting process. We have had lots of interest, with people from all over the world expressing interest in different aspects of learning and teaching in Higher Education. I am beginning to realize the amount of work that must go on behind the scenes in the other MOOCs I have attended. We have deliberately chosen to distribute the course across different platforms - WordPress (for the Home site), Moodle (for the course), Blackboard Collaborate (for the live synchronous sessions) and we are still discussing whether or not to have a separate wiki site, or to go with the wiki in Moodle. The reason for this decision (i.e. the different platforms) is that we hope to introduce participants new to teaching in HE to the idea that learning can take place in a variety of online spaces. Access to our WordPress site has been open pretty much from the word go, and now access to the Moodle site has been opened, despite the fact that neither of these is yet ready. For me, this is a new way of working and takes a bit of getting used to (heart in your mouth stuff!). Finally, we are conscious that the course has been designed to attract people for whom this way of working and the technology involved might be completely new -so we have to achieve the right balance between providing enough structure and support and encouraging open academic practice and independent learning - one of the many tensions involved in designing a MOOC."

blog post by Jenny Mackness on blog aggregation and tools to aggregate, May 17, 2012. The blog goes beyond the choice of tool to tagging protocols and how to aggregate when some of the writing/reflecting by learners is done behind password protected walls.

Brenda Kaulback provided this link--a lot here to think about in relation to Studio.

Blog post by Justin Marquis, December 29, 2011 at OnlineUniversities.com. I especially like the "Knowing Where" and "Connecting without a Connection" paragraphs for explaining the new skills needed to learn--where to search (and how), and incorporating new knowledge from others into one's "previous knowledge or patterns."

An interesting website that offers eCoach services to help someone become an online facilitator of professional learning communities. Scroll down to see promise of stimulus funds for eCoach certification.

This book, The Start Up of You, looks very good to me because it explains how networks (most easily maintained online!) create value that extends beyond finding a job and includes learning, building connections, etc. Reviewed by Claire Reinelt, April 26, 2012.