Group items tagged

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. 

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. 

In the second, the commenter chose to address a different social media tool: the English Job Search Wiki.

one new internet phenomenon that does prove useful — for people on both the hiring and applying ends of the job market — is the English Job Search Wiki.

Now that I see the power of Twitter for communicating with MLA members, convention attendees, and other interested people, I will think about more ways the MLA can promote conversations that extend well beyond the walls of the cities in which we meet.

But buried within the sense that the 140-character form trivializes our work — a complaint about condensation that might not be so far removed from faulting poetry for its failure to present extended realist narratives — is an implied concern about who it is that sees us being trivial.

a key form of outreach

not just to our colleagues but to the broader intellectual public, and to those whom we need to support higher education

The year’s lesson in twittering at conferences, for me, is that context is all. We’re still figuring out how media that are at once synchronous and asynchronous, and audiences that are at once present and absent, fit into our comfortable conference-going habits.

impossible to follow every discussion

gravitational fields that people follow, and where they group together

fluidity of people between nodes

fixed points of stimulating weekly keynote presentations

strategy to manage my approach of accessing the knowledge spread across the course.

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

The  biggest change has been in the way I meet and communicate with people in my PLN.

Most of the resources are in the form of links

social bookmarking

Discussion groups

Nings are like subject area resource rooms in a large school.

They’re social networks connecting teachers with common interests. In addition to discussion forums, members keep blogs, share resources, and plan group activities.

attended more conferences than ever before, but travel much less

students own and create their PLE but that the iMLE also has something to offer them, even though it is highly problematic in its current form

reconceptualise PLEs, so that they are locatable within both informal and formal learning contexts.

challenge the unhelpful binary of PLE versus VLE

the true nature of the PLE - its anatomy

in our view, the PLE is wider than the Web tools students use to create, find, organise and share content. It is also wider than the Personal Learning Network (PLN) of people and content that each of us generates when we learn informally or in formal contexts.

hybrid approach.

students require structure and scaffolding when they first venture into digital learning environments. No-one is a digital native, no matter how much the Prensky theory is talked up

Become a Blogger (and a Twitterer)

Develop Personal Connections