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Whilst Cloud Learning Environments (Web 2.0 tools) will not fully address all of the tensions between Managed Learning Environments and Personal Learning Environments, we argue that they provide a tentative bridge to provide the best of both worlds in terms of affordances and interoperability.

Children love to learn, but at some point they lose that and become adults that don't like formal learning. Let's explore why "play" has gotten such a bad rap and figure out how to get it back in education.

It is a "best practice" for classroom teachers today to use a website as a learning portal for links and resources related to class studies. In this learning module we'll learn the difference between blogs and wikis, explore examples of K-12 exemplary classroom wikis and professional portfolios, as well as tools for creating educational wikis.

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.

Developing online learning skills is essential for adult learners to support their completion of education goals. Although these students can easily locate an online course or degree program that's both convenient and accessible, they may face significant challenges in developing the skills necessary for success in an online learning environment.

Principles of networked learning, constructivism, and connectivism inform the design of a test case through which secondary students construct personal learning environments for the purpose of independent inquiry. Emerging web applications and open educational resources are integrated to support a Networked Student Model that promotes inquiry-based learning and digital literacy, empowers the learner, and offers flexibility as new technologies emerge. The Networked Student Model and a test case are described in detail along with implications and considerations for additional research.

Today's students will enter a job market that values skills and abilities far different from the traditional workplace talents that so ably served their parents and grandparents. They must be able to crisply collect, synthesize, and analyze information, then conduct targeted research and work with others to employ that newfound knowledge. In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.

E-portfolio efforts at Stanford have focused on capturing and documenting students' learning and engaging in reflection, rationale building, or planning, contributing to a culture of folio thinking. In fall 2010, Stanford initiated a pilot introducing e-portfolios to assist with the advising of students in their first two years prior to declaring a major, to learn from students and advisors how e-portfolios and folio thinking can enhance their face-to-face interactions. The pilot will explore the possibility that persistence can be improved through the active involvement of others (mentors, alumni, family, peers) in the lives of students as facilitated through the medium of e-portfolios.

This innovative style of learning grew into "peer instruction" or "interactive learning," a pedagogical method that has spread far beyond physics and taken root on campuses nationally. Last year, Mazur gave nearly 100 lectures on the subject at venues all around the world. (His 1997 book Peer Instruction is a user's manual; a 2007 DVD, Interactive Teaching, produced by Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, illustrates the method in detail.)

Personal learning networks are a great way for educators to get connected with learning opportunities, access professional development resources, and to build camaraderie with other education professionals. Although PLNs have been around for years, in recent years social media has made it possible for these networks to grow exponentially. Now, it's possible to expand and connect your network around the world anytime, anywhere.

Traditional use of the Web (i.e. non-mobile and non-video usage) is shrinking.  Per-person consumption of traditional Web content fell by 3 percent between March 2010 and March 2011 in terms of minutes. Within that shrinking slice of online time, Facebook is increasingly the portal for everything.  While the "document Web" (as author Ben Elowitz terms the old-style Web) shrank by 9 percent overall, Facebook consumption increased by 69 percent, essentially stealing time from everything else.  It now accounts for 1 out of every 8 minutes of online time, as opposed to 1 out of 13 at the beginning of the year.  Search engines, once the gatekeepers to the Web, are giving way to Facebook.  Google and everything it represents is facing the first stages of irrelevancy.

When we conceive of learner as knowmad, the traditional roles assigned to teacher and student become less relevant, necessary, and linear.  The knowmad is mobile and learns with anybody, anywhere, anytime.  As such, the place we now know as school may be too small and perhaps unable to contain the range of learning engagements necessary for those with nomadic tendencies.  Rather, think of the extended community--one that is physical, virtual, and blended-- as potential learning spaces that our knowmadic traveler composes, accesses, participates in, abandons, and changes.

To share & discuss education, learning and research in Connectivism, Technology, Web2.0, e-Learning, PLE, K-12, Higher and Open Education

Web 2.0 & Connectivist Learning will focus on utilizing new technologies to connect, collaborate, create, and share.  The primary focus will be on teacher professional learning and building a Personal Learning Network.  We will explore in depth how web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, social bookmarking, social networking, microblogging, and others can be utilized both for personal professional growth and how these tools might be used in the classroom.

PLC = Professional Learning Community

Throughout the last three years, we have researched what the future holds for fields as diverse as human longevity and the future of the web. That research helped us come up with 10 predictions for the future of social learning. If you are just now dipping your toes into the social learning pool, we hope the following predictions will give you some ideas about where the future is headed so that you can prepare accordingly.

Blended, or hybrid, learning has caught the eye of many looking into the potential of online learning, especially after the release of a meta-analysis and review of online-learning research by the U.S. Department of Education in May 2009. The authors found that "instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage" than either purely online or entirely face-to-face instruction.

With advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.

Through surveys, interactive brainstorming sessions, and a final community vote, the EDUCAUSE community identified their top five challenges in teaching and learning with technology.