SocialLearn project

The SocialLearn project, which is intended to be a more open replacement for the systems currently deployed by universities. It’s designed to be extensible, and will have a documented API for doing so; long term, the group hopes to make the whole package open source.

The vision

For 3000 years education has made the learner adapt to the system. SocialLearn aims to reverse this and make the education system adapt to the learner. SocialLearn is a project initiated by The Open University to combine the best of the values and approaches found in the new social web technologies with those of higher education. This will create new modes of recognised and supported learning experiences for a wide clientele.

Assumptions

SocialLearn is predicated on a number of assumptions:

• There is a major shift in society and education driven by the possibilities new technologies create for creating and sharing content and for social networking.
• Higher education, to date, has not really addressed how to engage with these fundamental shifts and their impact on the core business model of higher education.
• There is educational value in the application of both the technologies seen in web 2.0 and the approaches they embody.
• The status quo is no longer feasible or advisable; we need to apply the best of our expertise and experience to address the necessary change.
• Competition in the learner sphere is ever more complex, multi-faceted and fragmented; If higher education doesn’t address the issues this raises someone else will.
• The principles embodied in SocialLearn reflect the essence of the proposal – harnessing social networking for learning and include adopting an approach which is open, flexible, disruptive, democratic and, most importantly, pedagogically driven.

The term SocialLearn is used throughout this site to describe the concept under discussion: it does not constitute the proposed or even preferred eventual name for the project.

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Posted in SocialLearn blog

 

PADDLE: exploring PLEs

clipped from www.chester.ac.uk The University of Chester is proud to announce it is currently working in conjunction with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) to explore a project entitled “Piloting a DecentraliseD Learning Environment using standards based tools” otherwise known as PADDLE. This will involve exploring the concept, benefits and uses of personal learning environments or user owned technology, and the implications of this, for the institution, students and academics from technical, institutional and pedagogic perspectives. The project will be piloted initially beginning October 2007 with 1 module that a group of students based at the University of Chester are studying part time using a blended learning methodology. In preperation, the students’ needs have been analysed via a pre-pilot study, and a learning technology service has been provided to advise, demonstrate, and instruct the pilot group on the concept, practicalities, benefits and uses of this mode of learning.

 

PLE project at CETIS

The last five years have seen a major uptake of VLEs by colleges and universities. The vast majority of these are large, institutional systems, which are predominantly course based providing support for content distribution, discussion and assessment, mainly through proprietary tools. There are several problems with this approach of which two are of most concern.

• VLEs are not easily customised to suit the needs and preferences of individuals.
• As learners move between institutions, they may need to learn the interfaces to different VLEs.

An alternative approach would be to locate a large amount of VLE functionality with the learner either as a desktop application or an independently hosted portal. Institutions would still provide content via repositories, undertake assessment and so on, but learners would interact with these using their personal systems (Personal Learning Environment), comprising their preferred tools and ways of working.

The PLE project team at CETIS is currently working on developing the definition, scope and a reference model for PLEs.

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Posted in the personal learning environments blog