Group items tagged

a bunch of papers that were presented at the "PLE Conference", Barcelona, July 2010.

Citation: Lisa Dawley, (2009) "Social network knowledge construction: emerging virtual world pedagogy", On the Horizon, Vol. 17 Iss: 2, pp.109 - 121. Abstract: the purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the dynamics of an emerging form of teaching and learning - social network knowledge construction - associated with the use of social networks, particularly 3D virtual world environments such as Second Life. As social network technologies not only frame the way individuals interact and learn, but actually impact on a learner's thinking process and development of future consciousness, new pedagogies are needed to effectively integrate these communication mechanisms into the learning environment.

"The Personal Learning Environment concept is relatively new and is often used interchangeably with Personal Learning Network. The earliest reference is attributed to George Siemens in his 2004 paper, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Downes and Attwell have also popularised the concept with Downes describing the PLE as "a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources" (2006, p23). Semantically, a personal learning environment and a personal learning network differ, with a network referring to connections and the interaction between them, and an environment referring to a broader definition that includes more passive tools and settings. The network and its broader socially constructed environment are interdependent, constantly shaping each other and unable to be separated."

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 post, summarizing a twitter conversion seeking a definition of PLN v PLE, that was the background to Alec Couros' definition of PLN on Page 124 of his paper (used as a Week 1 Reading): "personal learning networks are the sum of all the social capital and connections that result in the development and facilitation of a personal learning environment." (Couros, 2010)

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)

Lessons learned through PLENK 2010

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.