EdTechUK

More PLE questions

Some interesting questions being raised about Personal Learning Landscapes across the blogosphere right now. This recent post by Juliette White,  a couple by Catherine Howell.

Also - for background and kudos, this post by Stephen Powell which really well sums up what the thinking was following the June Cetis PLE meeting.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is as an Advisory Board member to the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) 2007 Horizon Report. Here are some of the 2006 trends which are currently being carried over:

* '''Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.''' No longer in their infancy, tools for working collaboratively at a distance are easier to use and more commonly available than in previous years. It is no longer unusual to attend a conference online or to contribute to a project wiki. As the tools have matured, the practice of online communication and collaboration has increased. This trend is at the heart of social computing and is driving personal broadcasting as well.

* '''Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.'''  The presence of small devices like cell phones or mp3 players being carried about everywhere is almost a given; delivering content to those devices simply makes sense. This trend is growing in the consumer arena and is beginning to be felt in education as well. The ubiquity of these devices has enabled personal broadcasting (podcasting and vlogging) to take off almost overnight, and that is just the first wave of broadband content that will be ported to phones in the next few years.

* '''Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.''' The demand for personalized content and services, increasingly met by savvy retailers and service providers, and greatly enabled by the ability of the Internet to allow marketers to meet individualized needs will surface with increasing frequency in the world of academia.   Scholarly and cultural institutions are already beginning to differentiate themselves along these dimensions and that can be expected to continue and accelerate for some time.

* '''Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.''' As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge, a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning.

To me, the whole PLE project is an attempt to articulate and address these interwoven changes
- articulating the conceptual shift that acknowledges the reality of distributed learning practices and the range of learner preference. In that sense, a PLE could be described as basically a mechanism, process or interface through which a wide spread of data, conversations, ideas etc are able to be constructed, organised, accessed and presented.

This might suggest that the current state of web 2.0 is great, that all we need to do is work out some way of feeding our flickr account and a bunch of blog posts and comments into a CMS so that it can be evaluated and/or repackaged into a CV/research bid/presentation friendly format.  I don’t think this is the case though – I think that we’re currently limited in articulating what a potential PLE might be like by a lack of diverse examples. We also need a wider range of organisations involved – for example, the exam boards – in order to continue to check the formal and institutional limits of what’s possible. The CETIS Team have done a great job building an example of a desk-based version (although as someone who loathes desk-based aps, this wouldn’t in practice appeal to me), and the Elgg team have done a trailblazing job producing the first example of a web-based working version.

The PLE debates are stirring up a bunch of stuff, in their focus on the ways in which people learn across and between communities and networks, and the importance of synthesis and creating connections. They also raise a host of difficult technical, legal and organisational issues.

I’m coming at this from a very specific angle and other people will have different concerns– great. The thing that most excites me about the PLE at the moment that it isn’t fixed or settled, that it’s fundamentally a conversation across the edtech community about what learners need, what institutions might be providing, which PLE methods might be most useful. I see it as a practical attempt to get beyond the current dichotomy between closed CMS’s vs the small pieces approaches, by pushing innovators and institutions to develop and explore tools and platforms where communities and individuals can themselves determine boundaries, permeability and connections.

blog.ac.uk - the consequences

Well - last Friday certainly was a blast.

Even though the day panned out well - better than could have reasonably been expected - it was extremely frantic for me. One of the things that kept me sane through the whole process something Stephen Downes said at last years International Edublog Awards: While Dave Cormier carried out the thankless task of identifying the years top ten edublog stories, Stephen  suggested that the number one story should actually be the way that edublogging individuals had become an actual community - not in any abstract sense but in the very real, public, and meaningful way that people had reached across the globe to one another to share work, ideas, problems and aspirations.

This model of practice was very much what inspired and enabled last Fridays event to go ahead. So in addition to the delegates, facilitators, and to Stephen and Barbara, I very much need to extend my gratitude to the international community of edubloggers who have been so generous with their time, ideas, arguments and selves. A special shout out must go to James Farmer, who was very much at last Fridays event, in terms of inspiration and gossip (shh!!!).

I couldn't blog on the day, so I'm throwing in a Q & A I did for Stephen O'Hear after the jump.

Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto

Really useful article with an interesting bibliography, identifying a new & emerging ‘transfield’ named Critical Information Studies by Siva Vaidhyanathan that cuts across:

• the abilities and liberties to use, revise, criticize, and manipulate cultural texts, images, ideas, and information;

• the rights and abilities of users (or consumers or citizens) to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed;

• the relationship among information control, property rights, technologies, and social norms; and

• the cultural, political, social, and economic ramifications of global flows of culture and information.

Educational Freeware

Freeware author Marianne Wartoft has been producing software available as shareware or freeware for education for over a decade. She's set up a great new site, Educational Freeware, and writes:

"During my years as a freeware author, I have come across many good pieces of educational software that I would like to share with others. That's why I created this site.

The line between downloadable, installable software and online resources is getting less and less sharp - both kinds of software often serve the same purpose. I include them both on this site. The downloadable programs all run under Windows, and in some cases under Linux as well. The online resources are, of course, generally available under any operating system."

It's a fantastic project, and I wish her all the best in what will prove to be an invaluable resource for many learners. teachers and parents. On my wish list for future developments would be a submission form for readers favorite freeware sites, and perhaps a voting/comments form for sites people have used. I'd also like to see country of origin flagged up - especially important for literacy resources! 

Amazing Women at Microsoft

Thanks to Jon Rowett for this (where's your blog gone Jon?): Microsoft have produced a mini series of interviews with some of their women employees, who are working for the company in a range of posts including corporate vice president, speech writer, system protection, programmers and managers. It provides a nice resource of not only what women are doing in tech but of the range of roles available in the sector at the moment.

My only grip is that all the women are US based: Where's the UK equivalent? We know you have offices over here! Nevertheless, it's a good resource for people with a responsibility for/interest in promoting women in science and technology. Looking forward to seeing Google and Yahoo's contributions.

Learners as teachers as learners

A nice companion story for the children teaching adults the non-lethal use of PowerPoint that has recently been doing the rounds (thanks Albert! Thanks Stephen!): 7th of February is Safer Internet Day in the Netherlands, where:

"...an initiative for schools has been launched called "Ik zal je leren!" ("I will teach you!"). Various studies have pointed out that many parents and teachers are hardly aware of their children's activities on the internet, while the time children spend on the internet is growing rapidly. Many adults feel insecure about using the internet, and an interesting phenomenon arises: children often know more about the internet than the people who care for them.

For this reason, the Dutch awareness campaign Surf op Safe is going to turn the classical pedagogical patterns upside down: on 7 February 2006, children are going to teach their parents and teachers about their activities on the internet. The idea behind this switching of roles is to stimulate communication between children and adults about their internet use. By becoming more involved in the internet activities of their children, adults will be better able to discuss possible risks the internet may bring about.

Throughout the country children will teach adults. Schools are also invited to receive media, celebrities and public figures such as politicians to follow the lesson.

At this moment instructions are being developed for children as well as teachers, and for two levels: one for primary schools, and another one for secondary schools. All schools receive a mailing with information on the Safer internet Day.

Let's hope these kind of initiatives soon become common practice.

Make the right thing easy

Once again, Kathy Sierra hits the nail on the head...

Intellectual Property induction

Over at Creative Commons (CC), a report on a Goldsmiths College (London, UK) induction week lecture for post-grad research students delivered by Andrea Rota, digital rights activist and Liquid Culture Project member, looking at Intellectual Property rights and CC licensing. The materials (as you'd expect) are available under one of the CC license. It's kind of a bonus that they're looking at CC - the fact that they're taking an approach which prioritizes IP education is a ray of hope: To many institutions providing typically ad-hoc information that usually only manages to cover plagiarism (badly). Now what about the undergrads? 

Sign of the times

D'Arcy Norman ruminates on the recent US National Educational Computing Conference in general and podcasting in particular: "In the same way that a website without RSS is lame, in a year or so, conferences without podcasts will be lame."

Of course transcripts, podcasts and streamed video won't make people stop going to conferences - do promo videos and Cd's stop people going to see gigs? No. Because once people start to assimilate ideas or media into their own ways of thinking/preferences/identity, they usually want more. It's a win-win situation - people who aren't going to your conference can benefit, people who did go can reinforce and enhance their experience, the ideas you disseminate (if they're any good) will germinate within and contribute to communities of practice. & in turn, these people will most likely recognize and want to buy in to your resource in the future.

Food Force

The Food Force site from the United Nations World Food Programme has a wealth of resources to support learning and teaching about food aid and hunger crisis. Their key resource is a downloadable game (for Windows or Mac) where the player is a member of a new WFP team. The game is pitched at 8-13 years olds, and involves narrative introductions and real world clips, along with different mini-games representing the various stages in crisis response and recovery. There are also a ton of other resources across both sites, including photo and video clips, and an interactive world hunger map.

My son (Joseph Ishmael, aged 8), my niece (Talia Shortland, aged 11) and I (33) all trialed the game. We all learned significantly more than we new before about dealing with famine, and they both gave very positive feed back. Talia in particular played the games several times, although skipped through the narratives framing them. The games are easy, addictive and educational and the variety is good. We found the driving level a bit buggy after a few uses, but there were no other problems apart from this - downloading and instillation were simple.   

Recommended.