Group items tagged

Nice summary of the first week's readings and discussion by Stefanie Pike, Educational Technology and Change Journal.  "Both the discussion and readings helped me to refine my understanding of both concepts. To me, the term personal learning network refers to processes and structures within the personal learning environment. Another personal learning outcome is my new awareness of the importance of "curation" in online classes, an issue I have not yet thought about. A great deal of discussion time was dedicated to the problem of curation, that is, how to make the results of a forum or live discussion available without having to read through all comments. Dave Cormier and the participants vented different ideas and approaches - from structuring the process of curation in a wiki and using word clouds like Wordle and visualizations like concept maps to discourse analysis and approaches from computational linguistics. "Stephen Downes encouraged participants to be selective in their attention and activities within the class. "Think of it as football.  People do not stop watching football just because they cannot watch everything!" I wonder if Stephen was talking about american football or soccer? In soccer you just watch the player with the ball.

A discussion forum instigated by Scott Wilson, co-author of one of the Week 1 readings, and arguably (so far as I can tell from what I've read in the context of the PLENK2010 MOOC) the inventor of the term PLE. A good place to go for extra background and other readings related to "Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems" (Wlison, et al, 2007)

Interesting discussion, started by Emma Stodel of "competencies" in building and managing a PLE. Still not sure that I've seen a good description of just what is a PLE and why you need to be competent.

Post that adopts Viplax Baxi's description of a PLE as Learning Operating System (LearnOS) and attempts to align Downes' PLE functions with traditional OS functions. Also discusses the problem of recall ... which is an issue for me too, and one that I try to tackle by bookmarking everything.

Some more Three Letter Acronyms to guide us into week 2. Here we have ILE (Informal Learning Environment) and FLE (Formal Learning Environment). The ILE uses a wiki for knowledge aggregation, a forum (or microblogging tool like Yammer) for discussions and a set of profiles for documenting expertise or (human) points of contact for informal learning. (A commenter added Google custom search). The FLE includes a Learning Management System (LMS) for managing formal learning, assessment, etc. and a reports database for recording formally assessed competencies, compliance etc. The idea is that learning would take place in the ILE and formal assessment of competencies be recorded in the FLE. The model is aimed at corporate training but could be adapted for higher education. From "Learning in the Corporate Sector" by Ryan Tracey.

Terry Anderson discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of a PLE and VLE (LMS). This was in 2006 when Anderson was hoping that "Nonetheless, the PLE future seems to be more secure than that of any monolithic LMS. I suspect the LMS systems that survive will do so by opening themselves to standards based enhancements, service requests and the strong evolutionary move towards real learner centric educational applications." Four years on, it hasn't happened yet and if anything the monolithic LMS, at least as exemplified by Blackboard, is still fairly closed ... or where open, open only to incoming information.

A weakness for me of this paper is that the comparison does not seem to be comparing like-for-like. A tabular presentation might have been more helpful.

A wonderful analogy to the experience of being in a MOOC (or any other on-line community really). Sean might be missing out on some useful discussions if he's avoiding the Moodle forums. There's a lot going on there too.

"It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure." Clay Shirky speaking and Web2.0 Expo in 2008 between "Here comes everybody" and "Cognitive surplus". There was an interesting, somewhat negative, reaction from George Siemens when this video was mentioned in the Friday discussion ... Shared with PLENK2010 by Kimberly in the "Adventurous Learning" blog (http://learningpirate.blogspot.com)

I think this video was selected by Kimberly because the title chimed with the problems of coping with the amount of information that is being generated by the PLENK2010 MOOC. But it contains other interesting messages as well. For example the issue of privacy in social networks and issues around group work in social networks and the problems that may have for educational institutions.

Another summary of week 1 reading and a thoughtful discussion of how one might make a PLE a more formal self-learning aid than just a collection of tools and contacts that you have developed over time. That is if it's necessary to deliberately set out to create a PLE in order to achieve some learning aim.

"There has been lots of discussion this week about whether Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or Personal Learning Network (PLN) are the right terms to describe what this is all about and some recognition that this a semantics issue. According to Rita Kop PLE is a UK term and PLN an American term. Dave Cormier questions whether the term personal should be used at all. Stephen Downes points out that personal is an OK term if you think about [Personal Learning] Network as opposed to [Personal] Learning Network - and similarly for PLE. I like that - but for me, the words are not as important as the process - although I can see that the process needs nominalising for ease of reference. If I am going to think about introducing the idea of PLEs/PLNs to my colleagues or students then I will be talking about the process and the implications of this process for learning rather than what we should call it, i.e. why it might be preferable for students to learn in environments/spaces of their own choice rather than be confined to an institutions VLE/LMS."

"About four years ago, I wrote an article on Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks. In many ways, it was the start for me of what has become a somewhat sustained dialogue on teaching, learning, knowledge change, connectivism, and so on. Connectivism represents the act of learning as a network formation process (at an external, conceptual, and neural level …and, as I've stated previously, finds it's epistemological basis in part on Stephen's work with connective knowledge). Others have tackled the changes of technology with a specific emphasis on networked learning - Leigh Blackall, for example). And some have explored network learning from a standards perspective (Rob Koper). While not always obvious, there is a significant amount of work occurring on the subject of networked learning. What used to be the side show activity of only a few edubloggers now has the attention of researchers, academics, and conferences worldwide. Networked learning is popping up in all sorts of conference and book chapter requests - it's largely the heart of what's currently called web 2.0, and I fully expect it [networked learning] will outlive the temporary buzz and hype of all thing 2.0."

A (relatively) early discussion of the role of educator as curator published by George Siemens back in August 2007. I wonder if his perspective has changed since?

Discussion and example of the use of a new web tool from Xerox PARC discovered by Eva Berger. Trailmeme enables you to blaze a trail through a collection of websites and then share your trails with others who follow.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek philosopher Socrates, acknowledged as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Born in 469 BC into the golden age of the city of Athens, he has profoundly influenced philosophy ever since. In fact, his impact is so profound that all the thinkers who went before are simply known as pre-Socratic. In person Socrates was deliberately irritating, he was funny and he was rude; he didn't like democracy very much and spent quite a lot of time in shoe shops. He claimed he was on a mission from God to educate his fellow Athenians but has left us nothing in his own hand because he refused to write anything down. With Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University; David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University; Paul Millett, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge. Last broadcast on Thu, 27 Sep 2007, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4

Nice comparison of PLE and an institutional VLE (or LMS) -- in this case Blackboard -- based on what Gabi Witthaus wants to do with her PLE. In conclusion the VLE is seen has constraining so maybe it's the freedom to choose that puts the 'P' in PLE.

Originally flagged in the discussions by 'Plenker' Jim Stauffer- This "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group

Explores a multitude of social networking sites and discusses implications for privacy, security and digital reputation.