Group items tagged

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.

"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."

Writing in 1992 about technology in museums, Bearman neatly summarizes a profound shift in museums' perception of their mission, which has only accelerated since then with the explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web . This shift has inevitably placed stress on the curator's central role in the museum. Not that they weren't already under fire on many fronts, from issues of omniscient authority in a postmodern age of multiple meanings to accusations of parsimonious gatekeeping to the challenges of communicating difficult ideas and complex research to a "general audience" (which usually means a lot of very different audiences with specific needs and often-entrenched points of view). Regardless of how the curatorial role is defined, however, the Net in particular and interface culture in general introduce interesting and perhaps profound opportunities, which might also be perceived as competitive pressures in the culture arena quite old but stil interesting

An interesting slant on the idea of a PLE: to ensure that it is really personal, Jim Groom asks the participants in his class "Digital Story Telling" at UMW to purchase their own internet domain, get a hosting account at a hosting service and point their DNS registry records at it. Then create a blog (presumably using Wordpress, I didn't follow the link to the instructions, but it would be my recommendation). I'm not sure that I'd be quite so anti-institutional, but building a PLE around your own domain certainly ensures that it's identifiably yours.

Building a PLE around your own domain and hosting service certainly ensures that that it's identifiably yours. This is an example from "5 Points about PLEs PLNs for PLENK10", one of the week 1 readings.

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"

pretty exciting idea. See example on Pena=Lopez's blog -- http://ictlogy.net/20101105-personal-learning-environments-blurring-the-edges-of-formal-and-informal-learning-an-experiment-with-anthologize/

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)

Steve LeBlanc on the importance of exposing ourselves and risking feeling silly

For me this was an illuminating article which reinforced much of what I'd gleaned from readings and the need to look on conflict as a 'positive' which may open new perspectives. ----- New Technologies Can Keep You Connected and Help You Manage Information Overload. Learners become amplifiers as they engage in knowledge-building activities, connect what they learn, add value to existing knowledge and ideas, and re-issue them back into the network to be captured by others through their PLNs.

A way to create questions that can be used to encourage learning.