JOLT: special issue on next generation LMS

http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no2/abstracts.htm

 

Feeling skeptical about elearning

clipped from vignettestraining.blogspot.com “If he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. —E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1925)” The article essentially questions the fallacy that many earnest scientists fall into thinking that their method defines their patients or the areas of their study. In the adoption of tools and technologies in learning and training, many pundits fall victim to the same fallacy. Some examples are: 1. Learning Styles – that people can be categorized into some buckets on learning styles. 2. PLE – Personal Learning Environment, the new idea that people must now master their own learning as a consequence or as enabled by abundance of open learning technologies.

 

Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management System

This ECAR research bulletin details the arguments emerging in the blogosphere and elsewhere both for and against the learning management system. It examines whether the LMS is destined to continue as the primary means of organizing the online learning experience for university students.

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Citation for this work: Sclater, Niall. “Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems” (Research Bulletin, Issue 13). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar

 

Undergraduate student’s use of technology

This post by Niall Sclater includes some interesting information about undergraduate student’s use of technology.

 

Self-organized learning with Netvibes

Thanks to Ramón Ovelar ( again ) I found an interesting presentation of Malinka Ivanova about the use of start pages as Personal Learning Environments (PLE). These are the slides:

 

PLE Images Collection collected by Scott Leslie

Gracias a Ramón Ovelar por hacerme llegar el post.

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The exercise to collect as many PLE diagrams as I could was not an end in itself, as interesting as that might have been. In doing that, I was hoping to learn from how people conceived of their PLEs and use this as the basis for an attempt to illustrate my own PLE.

Looking at the collection, what struck me was that there were 3 main ways people oriented their PLE diagrams: by tools, by uses, or by people. I added a table of contents to the top of the wiki page that organized the diagrams around these orientations.

There are a few (interesting to me) outliers there as well, ones that combined a number of these orientations into a single diagram. These appealed to me, because I don’t see a PLE, even my own specific one, as being just a single set of tools; we do choose a specific set of tools, but often replace them with others that fulfill a function better. But in addition to the tools and the functions, an important aspect to me is the different ways we can use these tools based on levels of trust/online identity & reputation. That’s why the slogan “PLE is People” isn’t just a joke, funny though it might be.

So with that in mind I set to using my limited drawing skills to visualize my PLE in a way that captured not just the tools, but the uses and the trust relationships as well. I’m hoping the diagram is self explanatory (otherwise, well, what was the point!) but a few explanations:

• the circles extending outwards from the centre represent different levels of trust/relationships. They are dotted lines on purpose – these are not fixed; relationships change, you get to know some people better etc.

• the two headed arrows are meant to express the flow of information and learning – it is not all one way. You *can* just read blogs. You *can* just use del.icio.us without using it socially and following others. But I have always maintained that if we view these as actions (’blogging’ instead of just ‘blogs’) it helps us understand they as conversations, as the “read/write” particpatory web.

Please have a look. Would love to hear some feedback. Does this help illustrate the practice of a PLE any better? This is another one of my diagrams that percolated in the back (and I really do mean the back) of my brain for a while and then last week the specific way to visualize it just popped into my mind. I am not a great artist, indeed, every time I do a diagram like this it reinforces my need to better master a drawing tool (this was done in powerpoint!!!). And while others have ridiculed the term PLE’s in the past as being “just a bunch of drawings” I think that misses the point. A PLE is clearly not just a set of drawings, but the act of producing such a drawing, such a conceptualization, is an incredibly valuable one, not just for any educational technologist but indeed, I’d argue, for any learner, regardless of whether they conceive of it as a “PLE” or not. Knowing how you learn, and how you conceive of the structures and relationships that support your learning, is an important step to becoming a master learner. – SWL

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Posted in edtechpost on 2008/06/18

 

 

The default size of a Social Network: the rule of 150

When communities grow larger, self-organisation tendencies emanate, and frequently sub-communities covering more specific topics or smaller groups of friends are established.

clipped from www.masternewmedia.org The formation of smaller groups within a large collective can probably be described with the rule of 150. This axiom refers to the social channel capacity, the ability of the human brain to relate factual, emotional, and social details to people. A series of social studies show that the average person can remember these features for approximately 150 individuals. Psychologists explain this characteristic by using the evolution of human societies: early settlements did not comprise more than 100-150 people, and therefore the brain developed only to the point where it was able to store the information on all people in this social network. Thus, a “genuine” social network is limited to about 150 people.

 

The six degrees of separation

clipped from www.masternewmedia.org In 1967, American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the “small world experiment“, in which he sent letters to sixty volunteers in Kansas and asked them to forward the envelopes to a specific person in Massachusetts—by hand and through friends or friends of friends. The letters that reached the addressee were, on average, relayed by five to seven people. This is seen as an empirical proof that arbitrary people in our society are related to each other through friends and friends of friends. The small world hypothesis based on Milgram’s findings states that the number of personal acquaintances needed to connect two random persons on the planet is small. The hypothesis led to the expression “the six degrees of separation“, meaning that any two random persons are associated with each other by a chain of about six individuals. The “six degrees of separation” is one of the underlying concepts of social networks on the Internet.

 

PLEs and MLEs

clipped from blog.core-ed.net I have been working with an extension of these ideas, in particular, how the evolving understandings about personal learning environments relate to understandings about the ‘managed learning environments’ that schools and educational institutions are developing and working with. A managed learning environment is a term used by JISC in the UK, and is explained on Wikipedia as: A {learning management system] can be considered a sub system of a MLE, whereas MLE refers to the wider infrastructure of information systems in an organisation that support and enable electronic learning on a wider scale. Personal Learning Environment that is “owned”, managed and maintained by the individual learner, and Managed Learning Environment that is “owned, managed and maintained by a school or insitution. Both of these systems have legitimacy – it isn’t simply a matter of choosing between one or the other. Schools/insitutions must develop systems that help them to successfully manage the provision of teaching and learning services to their students, while students on the other hand are increasingly choosing to “live their lives online”, and want to be able to integrate all aspects of their learning lives within a personalised interface/environment. In my view, this sort of environment will essentially be an aggregator of the various services and applications that an individual learner chooses to have in their PLE.

 

Participatory nature of the Web

clipped from hinchcliffe.org