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Vanessa Vaile

Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Project - 0 views

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 03 Jun 10 - Cached
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    The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services.
Vanessa Vaile

Weaving a Personal Web: Using online technologies to create customized, connected, and ... - 0 views

  • Abstract: This paper explores how personal web technologies (PWTs) can be used by learners and the relationship between PWTs and connectivist learning principles. Descriptions and applications of several technologies including social bookmarking tools, personal publishing platforms, and aggregators are also included. 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.
  • This paper explores personal web technologies (PWTs) and their learning applications.
  • Connectivism and the need for continuous learning In today’s world, 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). In times of rapid change, it is not always prudent or possible to offer formal training for each individual’s every need, and some needs may best be addressed by the individual him/herself. Using freely available personal web technologies, employees can create a personal learning environment (PLE) to manage their own learning resources; whether these are wikis, news feeds, podcasts, or people.
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  • Overview of Personal Web Technologies
  • Visualization of a web-based Personal Learning Environment
  • PWTs allow learners to expand their capacity for knowledge by connecting to external resources (other people, online databases, reference sites, etc.). 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.
  • Social Bookmarking and Research Tools 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.
  • Tools that are geared more towards social bookmarking (e.g., Delicious, Diigo, and Twine) place greater emphasis on features that allow users to easily share their bookmarks with friends, colleagues, or the public
  • Tools that are geared more towards academic research, such as Zotero or Connotea, include bibliographic features, such as citation generators and reference list management.
  • Personal Publishing Tools A variety of free and user-friendly tools are available to publish oneself on the Internet. Iskold (2007) sees the range of personal publishing options as a continuum, ranging from content-focused, formal blog posts to socially-focused, informal messages posted on social networking sites, with micro-blogging falling somewhere in the middle.
  • 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
  • more than online diaries.
  • individualized content management system that publishes, organizes, and archives
  • easy to go beyond basic text and incorporate other media, such as photographs, videos, and audio
  • Micro-blogs,
  • 'follow' other members to receive a stream of their posts
  • allow them to easily "ask and answer questions
  • Aggregators Individuals who follow multiple blogs and/or regularly visit news or media sites may find juggling the disparate streams of information overwhelming.
  • tools filter online information and collect articles, media, and conversations customized to the user's needs
  • 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
  • Two of the most popular metagators are 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
  • Using Personal Web Technologies to Create PLEs and PLNs
  • PWTs can be combined by the individual to make a personal learning environment (PLE) and to create and manage a personal learning network (PLN). Due to the fact that they are user-created, there is no exact definition of a PLE
  • 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.
  • Users can create an online PLN of colleagues and friends from around the world by joining social networking sites, following and commenting on relevant blogs, sharing resources on a social bookmarking site, or by using a micro-blogging platform.
  • Learning Applications of PWTs Because these are open-source, free, adaptable, and user-friendly, PWTs can be of great value to teachers, trainers, and students. However, there is a catch: PWTs may clash with traditional, linear, teacher-centered instruction
  • critical media and information literacy skills, so that students can effectively navigate the online maze and avoid being fooled by false or misleading information.
  • Five Potential Disadvantages of Using PWTs for Learning Although personal web technologies have the potential to support all types of learning, they also have potential disadvantages, ranging from distractions to security concerns.
  • Connection Addiction.
  • Work Interrupted.
  • Popularity Contests.
  • Echo Chambers.
  • Privacy and Security Concerns.
  • Conclusions When learners adopt personal web technologies, it enables and requires them to discard their roles as passive consumers of information and to take on new roles. To successfully use PWTs, learners must become editors who critically question content and sources, librarians who organize and archive resources, and also creators who add their voice to the online chorus by engaging in discussions, collaborating on projects, and contributing their own ideas and media
  • he true quality and effectiveness of a PLE or PLN depends on the learner him/herself
Vanessa Vaile

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching - 0 views

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    tudent response system (SRS) use may provide one solution for transforming the passive and isolated online learning environment experienced by many students. SRS use combined with sound pedagogical practices can create an active learning environment comprised of a collaborative social learning community capable of effectively meeting varied learning needs. Newly developed SRSs have created the opportunity to explore online SRS use. Incorporation of SRS use within behaviorism, social constructivism, and many other pedagogical approaches makes it a tool worthy of consideration in solving pedagogical dilemmas and creating a positive learning experience. Despite a lack of research related to online SRS use, this article utilizes current SRS and online polling research and information to determine the primary benefits and challenges associated with online SRS use.
Vanessa Vaile

Perspectives on Tag Clouds for supporting reflection in Self-organised Learning - 1 views

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    paper on tagging, clouds, reflective learning Abstract: Tags are popular for organising information in social software based on the personal views of the participants on the information. Tags provide valuable attention meta-data on a person's interests because the participants actively relate resources to concepts by using tags. This paper analyses three designs for tag-clouds that are integrated in the ReScope framework for reflection support. ReScope provides a widget for visualising personal tag-clouds of the tags that were used with social bookmarking services. The presented designs focus on processing and representing attention meta-data on the levels of recency, of collaboration, and of social connectedness from the perspective of situated learning. The present paper analyses how the designs are related to the underlying presumptions for supporting reflection using the different representations of attention meta-data.
Vanessa Vaile

Twenty-First Century Literacies | HASTAC - 0 views

  • What cognitive skills are crucial for educators to attend to in our digital age? Media theorist and practitioner Howard Rheingold has talked about four "Twenty-first Century Literacies"--attention, participation, collaboration, and network awareness
  • see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/category?blogid=108&cat=2538
  • Futurist Alvin Toffler argues that, in the 21st century, we need to know not only the three R's, but also how to learn, unlearn, and relearn.  Expanding on these, here are ten literacies that seem crucial for our digital age.  
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  • Attention:  What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era?
  • Participation:  Only a small percentage of those who use new "participatory" media really contribute.  How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation?  What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level?
  • Collaboration:   How do we encourage meaningful and innovative forms of collaboration? 
  • methodology of "collaboration by difference"
  • Network awareness: 
  • how we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others
  • Design:   How is information conveyed differently in diverse digital forms? 
  • Narrative, Storytelling:  How do narrative elements shape the information
  • Critical consumption of information
  • Digital Divides, Digital Participation: 
  • Ethics and Advocacy:
  • Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning:
  • trying to unlearn ones reflexive responses to change situation is the only way to become reflective about ones habits of resistance.
Vanessa Vaile

The Ning Thing.docx - 0 views

  • good source for information on Ning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website)
  • Ning was a free-form platform for the development and hosting of open-source social applications
  • Ning pricing structure is three-tiered, as explained here: http://blog.ning.com/2010/05/introducing-ning-pro-ning-plus-and-ning-mini.html
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  • ompelling affordances for group collaboration
  • Participants can sign up or sign in and set up profiles for any particular Ning, parts of which carry over to other Nings, achieving familiarity with minimal repetition of data entry
  • crucial components of many educators’ PLNs
  • Nings have c
  • Webheads in Action used to enroll participants in its free bi-annual WiAOC international online conferences in a Moodle, but for the last one, moved the community over to a Ning (http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/). This Ning now has over 350 members.
  • Because Nings were free and robust for collaboration, they were an ideal tool for educators seeking to jump-start communities on little or no funding.
  • Alec Couros sees this kind of thing happening more and more in the crystal ball future and suggests that schools and educators would be better off investing in self-hosting using FOSS, free and open source software (Couros, 2010).
  • general consternation
  • a number of issues
  • One is for how long Internet users can expect free services
  • other side of the coin is the nature of teaching, where hard-pressed teachers with little time and less budget tend to cobble together whatever resources they can muster
  • Monetization is rarely a consideration for teachers and educational technology specialists
  • , whose main aim is to find platforms that will support learning through sharing.
  • The immediate concern following an announcement such at the one issued by Ning April 16 is simply preservation of content stored at the free site
  • sponsorship is available only for “Ning Networks focused on North American K-12 and Higher-Ed ... including Ning Networks that facilitate learning in a classroom, best practices, educator-to-educator collaboration, or parental support,”
  • Pearson, who have offered to sponsor Nings for educators at the Mini level, the lowest level of Ning
  • almost all continents on the planet are excluded from the deal
  • Kevin Hodgson has been writing some interesting posts about the Ning thing.
  • the only reliable alternative to Ning is to host your community yourself, or at a trusted institution
  • http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning).  This document remains the most comprehensive source of advice on what to do about replacing Ning that exists anywhere on the Internet
  • Alec Couros (2010) decided to crowdsource some answers
  • back up your Ning
  • there are a number of sites offering Ning-like look and feel which will (attempt to) import your content, or some of your content, from Ning
  • Grou.ps
  • Grouply
  • designed to work as a social-network portal for Yahoo and Google Groups.
  • see: http://webheads.grouply.com/
  • A tool that works well for capturing blog content is Posterous
  • Spruz
  • Wackwall
  • Good and Bazzano (2010) have a good rundown of many of the options listed here
  • another free site that lets you set up a Portal with features similar to those of Ning.
  • another social networking portal which will do much the same thing
  • Other sites encourage you to restart your community afresh
  • Stevens, V. (2010). The Ning thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1. Retrieved on today’s date from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/.
  • Posterous Targets Ning
  • Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning theory for the digital age. Elearnspace. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.
  • Good, R. and Bazzano, D. (2010). Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services. MasterNewMedia May 3rd, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.masternewmedia.org/ning-alternatives-guide-to-the-best-social-networking-platforms-and-online-group-services/.
  • If you wish to write anonymously on a Ning thing document, you can do so at Alec Couros’s crowdsourced Google Doc here: http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning
  • Multiliteracies
TESOL CALL-IS

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    The creator of Hole in the Wall: The Future of Learning: can it be a school in the cloud. This 22+ min. talk is inspiring for those who love technology and futurist thinking. He aks for help in designing the "School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud." Are we still creating for a machine that no longer exists? On anecdote about the Hole in the Wall: The children said that the machine used only English, so they had to teach themselves English to use it -- very casually.
Vanessa Vaile

P3 Conference 2010: Or, How Attending a Digital Humanities Conference Helped Me to Valu... - 1 views

  • P3 stands for Peer-to-Peer Pedagogy
  • ethics of using digital tools.  "Its not about homogenizing difference," she said; "its about making space for difference." 
  • P3 reminded me that it's not about the technology--it's about the people who create it, collaborate on it, and question it. 
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  • Even at a digital conference, it's ultimately the people that make that time worthwhile. 
  • The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg,
  • lateral rather than hierarchical modes of learning, individualized educational strategies, global vision, lifelong learning, and collaboration by difference. 
  • "technology is not just software and hardware.  It is also all of the social and human arrangements supported, facilitated, destabilized, or fostered by technology." 
  • On my way home, I read William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.  Powers argues that by living in a world where "everyone is connected to everyone else all the time," we become disconnected from our own self-awareness and inner depth. 
  • Today's digital technology explosion is no different from the advent of language, writing, mass-produced print or the telegraph
  • Seven Philosophers of Screens: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Franklin, Thoreau and McLuhan, who lived through other technological explosions
  • By following the lessons of these seven philosphers in "a tour of the technological past," Powers shows how we can combat "the conundrum of the connected life" with techniques he calls the "Walden Zone" and the "Internet Sabbath," sacred times and places to disconnect with the Internet and reconnect with ourselves and our loved ones.  Both of these books, like the P3 UnConference, celebrates technology not as an end to itself, but as a means to enhance the human experience.  And like the P3 UnConference, both value time away from technology as a way to enhance that experience even more. 
Vanessa Vaile

5 Tips for Getting the Most out of Google Reader « - 1 views

  • Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
  • some features don’t really have a click-able counterpart
  • get a list of the available keyboard shortcuts from the Google Reader help page
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  • Go Full screen
  • Ditch the Home Page
  • Group and Prioritize
  • Use Trends
  • interesting insights into which feeds you really read, when you read them and what you clicked, the real value is in pruning your feeds.
  • unsubscribe from the dead weight
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    see comments for more tips
Vanessa Vaile

critical-thinking - Crap Detection 101 - 1 views

  • Network Awareness Self organization (Smart Mobs) - There are examples of people organizing and mobilizing using networks in Spain, in Chile (penguin revolution), and here in the US (immigration protests).
  • Building trustworthy networks (part of crap detection) is a skill that students need to learn.
  • Attention - Collaboration - Critical Thinking - Network Awareness All of these skills need to work together. They aren't taught in schools. Students aren't teaching each other these literacies, though they are teaching each other many other things.
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  • Attention Showed video. Wonder why/how some students can divide their attention.
  • Learning how to read and write has a social component. We can use the ability to work in consort to our benefit. Takes many literacies that have an internal and external component
  • Used to have people who checked facts of books. When you put a term in a search engine you have no idea whether the information is accurate, credible or bogus.
  • First ask, "who is the author?", Is there an author. or who takes responsibility for the site.
  • Personal Learning Networks are very important.
  • 2 questions are now becoming essential. 1. How can you pluck the answer to any question out of the air? 2. How do you know that what you find is accurate?
Maria Rosario Di Mónaco

The Educator's PLN - The personal learning network for educators - 0 views

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    Personal learning network for educators
Vanessa Vaile

adVancEducation: Modeling your PLN: Backchanneling with Students - 2 views

  • PLN, or Personal Learning Network
  • what we envisage involves colleagues sharing information in a social network or community of practice
  • Scott Leslie's nice collection of PLE diagrams: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams
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  • one of the ten paradigm shifts that I think educators must make as they move into facilitating learning in the 21st century
  • we should be teaching as 21st century life skills: creativity, communication, collaboration
  • The problem is where networks might collide
  • distracting clutter
  • LISTS
  • Edmodo
  • Edmodo
  • Etherpad
  • why we'd want to backchannel with students
  • a classic: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
  • This post therefore is yet another example of how a PLN works
Maria Rosario Di Mónaco

Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

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    a must-read article
Vanessa Vaile

Media Habit - 0 views

  • the most modern communication tools — blogs, podcasts, YouTube — are actually returning us to an ancient form of media, one in which everyone participates on almost equal footing.
  • fundamental human urge to tell our own stories
  • Before mass media, before the written word — for all of human history — story-telling was a shared privilege.
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  • Mass media succeeded in creating a common culture, but did nothing to foster the communities that naturally emerge when people tell their stories to each other.
  • Now, finally, there is a counter-trend.
  • Howard Rheingold framed it beautifully, when he wrote The Virtual Community, nearly 15 years ago: "Perhaps cyberspace is one of those informal public places, where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall."
  • newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage
Vanessa Vaile

The PLN Staff Lounge - 2 views

    • Vanessa Vaile
       
      OK most points but re pt #: I need to clean up follower list & boot off spammers. which is better, checking as new followers sign on or schedule regular list purging sessions?
    • Vanessa Vaile
       
      next thought. question I could use feed back on: how to use a twitter account for multiple purposes, e.g. professional (whatever that is for someone retired), community, personal, special interest (advocacy, avocation research), etc. Not including elements of personal in "professional" affects voice, makes it too institutional. Tweets are a writing genre and voice counts. 
  • 5) You only ever tweet stuff about your daily life
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  • how to use it to build a PLN (personal learning network)
  • My Top Ten Twitter Turn-Off's
  • 1) No profile, or profile picture
  • Your profile tells people who you are
  • If you decide to add a link to your profile, make sure it is not a dead link, an under construction page, an affiliate shop, or a page which launches pop up windows
  • 2) No tweets
  • 3) Hiding your tweets
  • 4) You have lots of spammers following you
  • 10) Being overly-self promotional
  • "Cliff Notes" version of advice for Twitter newbies
  • 7) You are mainly using Twitter to sell or promote something
  • 8) You don't tweet any links
  • Check out some blogs and online newspapers for topical or interesting stories, and use a url shortener such as bit.ly, (http://bit.ly/)
  • Searching for twitter hashtags (#)
  • Some examples
  • 9) You don't interact with other users, or re-tweet other people's posts
  • Twitter is a social media tool
  • collaboration, discussion, and sharing
  • 6) You mainly tweet stuff about yourself
  • the 80/20 ratio (i.e. 80% of your tweets should be about something other than promoting yourself or your blog
  • Karenne Sylvester wrote a great article a while back about how a you can tell a lot about people from what they tweet and how they conduct themselves on Twitter.
  • part of your Digital Footprint
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