Group items tagged

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.

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

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

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

How knowledge is “grown” as individuals interact with others

How individual learners develop their conceptual understanding of a topic

How teams solve complex problems

tools and activities that are most effective

How individual learners “eliminate” unneeded or irrelevant ideas and concepts

explore various methods for analyzing data

tools that aid that analysis.

Reflections on Open Courses: Curation, Ombuds, and Concierges

focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data

methods for analyzing data produced by learners and numerous tools that aid that analysis

Google’s search algorithm has been ruined argues

What’s the solution? Well, a return to curation, of course.

What does this have to do with LAK11?

over the last five years, social networks and social media have taken over the web

We trust people we like, people with whom we feel a connection

All social interactions are information. Many information interactions are social.

urators – they present their views and spin existing stories within the framework of their beliefs

“temporary centres”.

problem of how to create temporary centres

ome commentary or facilitator posts

LAK11, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve retained similar course design elements to previous open online courses (OOCs – I’m starting to think that M=Massive part of MOOCs is misleading or even off-putting

What we gain in our decision to run this course on various sites, using more or less accessible tools, is the demonstration that anyone with an interesting topic/idea and a willingness to experiment can open up a course for a broader audience.

What we lose – and I’m still uneasy about this trade off – is the integrated archive of activity in the course.

Complexity cannot be understood solely through algorithms

data mining, visualization

human aspect of data, sensemaking, curation, and trust

What is new with constructivism today is that these principles are being (have been) coupled with existing calls for educational reform

calls for increased learner control

From whence does connectivism originate?

1. Tools augment our ability to interact with each other and to act.

“carriers of patterns of previous reasoning”

all technology carries an ideology.

2. Contextual/situated nature of learning.

3. Social learning theory

4. Epistemological views: all learning theory is rooted in epistemology

5. Concept of mind.

6. We also find a compatible view of connectivism in the work of new media theorists such as McLuhan

7. We also find support for connectivism in the more nebulous theories of complextiy and systems-based thinking

8. Network theory

The Unique Ideas in Connectivism

1. Connectivism is the application of network principles to define both knowledge and the process of learning.

2. Connectivism addresses the principles of learning at numerous levels – biological/neural, conceptual, and social/external

3. Connectivism focuses on the inclusion of technology as part of our distribution of cognition and knowledge.

4. Context. While other theories pay partial attention to context, connectivism recognizes the fluid nature of knowledge and connections based on context

5. Understanding. Coherence. Sensemaking. Meaning.

learners are a diverse group

uniformity of university program tracks masks the differences of learners.

In an open course, participants aren’t filtered in the same way.

Higher education generally homogenizes learners through pre-requisites or subject streams (programs).

we begin to connect with those who respond favorably, we gravitate toward those who we find interesting (but not so interesting that we feel no connection),

One of the primary ways of connecting with others in an open course is through creating and sharing artifacts of sensemaking.

When our learning is transparent, we become teachers.

Essentially, we form small sub-networks that connect (lattice-like) to other sub-networks

It reduces the complexity, yes, but more importantly it provides a starting point for a common process. Without it, we would be lost in theory. 

The same holds for learning to some degree. We look for structure, but if none exists on sight, we combine things until some structure emerges. That structure can be represented in a single symbol, but its foundation might shift as new understanding emerges. Occasionally, there is need to ditch the symbols or invent a new one altogether as emerging learning dictates. That is a healthy and complicated process. The MOOC captures this process a bit and adheres to an open structure to allow pattern language to emerge, a shared vocabulary, a knowledge construct (however ephemeral).

Feedback as friction as forces interact. A spark, a collision, waste, and occasionally a nova. A big (learning) bang. This makes me think a learner's responsibility (among many others) is to be open to this collision of actors, agents, feedback, waste, noise, and then, ideally, pattern, understanding. The only way out is through.

Disturbing- an ontological disturbance, an unknown, an uncanny sense of veering through uncharted, potentially treacherous waters. It is a good place to be as a learner, but it requires a strength and confidence that only an empowered learner could put forth. But in that disturbance, that mess, there is the friction, that meat-grinder of understanding.

This is learning as curiosity and sometimes it can be quite scary. 

Often we seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge (anyone subjected to my endless banal history lessons will understand this), but I do believe that most learning is action oriented. To learn not only to get a job, to live in a world, to subsist, but rather for acting as best as we can. For improvement, for progress, for self-actualization.

disaggregated, emotive, functional machine of interaction. One that has to be tinkered with constantly. 

2. Too many aspects of my sensemaking system are manua

Information is not something that has value in itself. We use it to do something

What tools do you use? Eric von Stackelberg Profile Edit profile icon Following Followers Market Posts Poll Pages Blog Files Photo Albums I have moved to fewer tools with the intention of increasing the depth of data held in those tools while reducing duplication.