Social Software and more…

Since we just had our 3rd International scil Congress (and I will hopefully write a little bit about this later today) where one of the topics was Personal Learning Environments, I find this collection of PLE illustrations quite interesting (via edtechpost). The illustration that I like most is the following: source: http://thand.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/ple-2/ I like this one so much because it includes a number of dimensions, e.g. teacher-mediated, more instituionalized instruments, rather personal instruments. I’m don’t think that the dichotomy of formal vs. informal resp. declarative vs. tacit knowledge is consistent but nevertheless this way of structuring the PLE seems a good start What we did in a postconference workshop with Graham Atwell was to think about our own PLEs. I quite liked this idea to start from the personal point of view and then try to come up with a more general idea what the PLE might be about.

Tags: PLE, scil, Congress08

I usually don’t like to embed YouTube videos but have a look at this one:

YouTube-video

As foreigner in Switzerland (I don’t really feel like it anyway), I love the Swiss specialities

Found via Miriam Meckel

After about three months of being caught up in projects and doctoral seminars, I finally start to blog again. I’ll give it one more try and if it does not work this time, I’ll just quit. I have been reflecting whether this is my way of publishing at all; and I still think it might be. The incentive to start blogging again came through the author of the Ideant-Blog Ulises A. Mejias who recently posted his complete dissertation on networked proximity online. He wrote there:

I am thankful to those who read the dissertation drafts I posted on my blog, commented on them, or merely linked to them because they thought they were interesting. Given what I learned from the process of maintaining a blog during my graduate studies, I highly recommend the practice to anyone embarking on a similar journey.

 I think that provides a strong motivation… I’m still wondering how appropriate it is in the European system to put parts of my dissertation online before it is published. Not to speak of the fact that I’m writing in German. Anyway, I’ll see how it works and I keep you posted!

Even though I usually don’t like to advertise for Elliot Masie , I just found a podcast on how to do podcast for educational purposes through Masie’s newsletter. You can get the podcast from this site.

Some ideas they used:

• Using interview podcasts with experts from the subject area that you need for your own seminar
• "treasure hunt" podcast: using a podcast to lead people through certain locations. This could be used for the introduction of new employees in a company
• course cast: record a regular course and distribute it for reinforcement and repetition of the course
• integrating podcasts into other devices, e.g. coffee machine, kitchen, etc. to support the work flow or to train employees
• "executive books program" –> author interviews about their books, about 20 minutes to reduce the immense amount of material otherwise to be found.

I just listened to an online lecture on E-Learning 2.0. The lecture was organized by the German e-learning portal e-teaching.org.

Tanja Jadin & Jürgen Wageneder from the Universities of Linz and Salzburg presented their thoughts on E-Learing 2.0 which are also available on their website.  After talking about some more general issues about the difference between web1.0 and web2.0, and some learning scenarios, they came to Personal Learning Environments towards the end of the lecture. I found this graphical reprensentation quite interesting:

 They also deducted competencies they find necessary for the prospective students learning in such personal learning environments:

• ICT-competence
• Net-competence
• Time-management
• Competence to learn self-regulated
• Collaboration competence
• Competence to deal with content
• Information competence
• Competence to deal with publicity
• Learning Design
• alternative ways of assessing (source: Jadin/Wageneder, 2007, online-lecture)
  

I just found out about a very interesting networking event which took place last Thursday via a skype conference. More information can be found on the organizer’s website. The documentation on the event is very comprehensive and can be found here or here.

Anja Wagner’s slides can be found in slideshare.  

Thanks to all for sharing this. And I’ll try to participate next time… 

On 3 April 2007, we had a workshop on the Net Generation with Dianna Oblinger (Vice-President of Educause) in St. Gallen / Switzerland (for more information see this flyer). Dianna covered the following topics:

- Educating the Net Generation - Listening to What We Are Seeing?

- Learning Spaces: what will our universities look like in the future?

More information on these topics can be found at Educause’s website. Educause published a couple of e-books dedicated to the above mentioned topics: Educating the Net Generation, Learning Spaces.

Mandy Schiefner also wrote a comprehensive report on the workshop which can be found here. 

I’m currently at the conference "Web2.0 at school" in Arth-Goldau in Switzerland.

The conference started out with a wonderful presentation by Beat Doebeli Honneger who also puts most of his presentations online on his website. He talked about the power of wikis but started out with a great demonstration on the power of storytelling including an analogy of fishing for learning.

I also gave a talk about how to use wikis in schools, including a number of examples. Most of them are documented in our SCIL report which can soon be downloaded as a pdf-file from our website.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference.  

via the CSCL-Community

Last week, I was wondering how much the CSCL community is involved in web2.0-applications. One of my guesses was that social software is too trivial for this community. However, there is some web2.0 during the CSCL-pre-conference in July 2007. But my guess seems to be confirmed nevertheless since Erik Blankinship’s afternoon session on Wiki Video seems quite sophisticated. I’m curious how the rest of the conference program will look like. But I guess, I have to wait a few more days when the conference program is available at the conference website

Any opinions on this question?

Via Mandy Schiefner I found out about a new framework for education and research which mainly deals with the exchange of data and how using a service-oriented infrastructure could actually support administration, education, and research. I’m not quite sure whether this could actually lead to more funding, however, most of the other ideas shown in the video seem very fascinating. This kind of standardization might actually be a possible way for Personal Learning Environments as well which would highly profit from standards. Here’s the original description and below you can find the link to the great visualisation of the e-Framework.

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an initiative by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Australia’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). The primary goal of the e-Framework is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes. Quelle

 

Here’s the link to the little film

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