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Could teachers and lecturers instead supply these personally relevant and meaningful learning experiences? Diana Laurillard, in her inaugural professorial lecture at the Institute of Education, points to the impossibility of teachers on their own supplying a personalised learning experience.[1] Indeed, the impossibility of supplying learners with personalised learning experiences is, in general, a self-evident truth to those of us who work in the education sector. The only course that remains, then, is for learners to construct these learning experiences for themselves. In fact, self-directed learning is the only economically feasible means of providing a personalised and meaningful learning experience on any kind of massified scale. Whatever the brouhaha about what a PLE is, the thing that underpins and unifies the PLE movement is that it is about learners doing it for themselves; learners taking control of, directing and managing their own learning. A PLE provides the infrastructure for that kind of learning. Of course, infrastructure is only part of the solution; the other part is achieving the pedagogic revolution. This relies on students unlearning their current learning practices and adopting new practices in a guided and supported fashion.

The good old 'Skills Versus Knowledge' debate. How can they be measured ? Michael refers to 'serious gaps between elite educational credentials and actual individual competence'.What makes for great reading are the comments.

Graham Attwell This paper explores some of the ideas behind the Personal Learning Environment and considers why PLEs might be useful or indeed central to learning in the future. This is not so much a technical question as an educational one, although changing technologies are key drivers in educational change. (2007)

From Nancy Rubin: Objects of Interest. "I have spent a lot of time designing lessons and curriculum using Bloom's taxonomy. If you look at the different levels of Bloom's model, both the original and the revised version, blogging seems to be one of the best ways for student's to attain higher order thinking skills."

Bloom's taxonomy and blogging. Every educator should read this.

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)

From facilitator Dave Cormier -- "The concept of the Personal Learning Environment in all of its wondrous forms has been one that I've struggled with over the last four or five years that I've been familiar with it. I'm very excited to be taking part in the PLENK10 course in order to take the time to focus on these ideas and get a clearer sense of what I mean by the word. I would add, that I think this is one of the central values of an open course… it provides the opportunity to bring clarity to a subject in a field… even if we end up with different clarities"

An important contribution the the PLE v LMS debate that will be the focus of Week 2. Dave Cormier says that "The PLE/LMS debate is not about autodidacticism, it's about the decentralization of power". Dave and commentors Michael Feldstein and Alan Levine see a a role for institutions, educators and even an LMS in the "brave new world" of the PLE.

Bibliographic records of education literature, plus a growing collection of full text. Search by terms or keywords.

Will Richardson raises the bar for educators to start doing some educating and equip students with critical literacy skills as in 'The Definition of 21st Century Literacies Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee February 15, 2008.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

Sounds like PLENK is on the right track

Howard says: Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. The inside and outside of infotention work best together.......................Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research

A most comprehensive site with a lot about 'lots' including many resources explaining the educational impact of Second Life

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

Online interactions reinforce face to face class interaction. A case of "weak ties" strengthening/supplementing the strong ties? More ties is always more better, i would think.