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 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… 

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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The annual WCET 2006 conference took place in Portland last week and it focused on technologies in learning with presentations and sessions on social software and e-portfolios. The slides by Chris Lott on "Making sense of social software" are available online. I will integrate some of the  graphics in this post because I think they neatly summarize  social software and how it is seen nowadays. The first image shows how people participate in web2.0 applications and how they exchange information by using them. It also shows the underlying technologies and in my opinion provides a quite comprehensive explanation of web2.0:

source: Dion Hinchcliffe (unfortunately, I cannot find the exact post, since I got the image via Chris Lott’s presentation)

The next image is by Chris Lott herself and shows the connections between wikis, blogs, and discussion forums:

source: WCET presentation by Chris Lott 

And last but not least, here’s the enhancement of the image by other web2.0 technologies like photo sharing, social bookmarking, and media casting:

source: Chris Lottman 

I still have to ponder these models for a while, but I wanted to let you know right away…

The University of Zurich offers a number of lectures on Educational Engineering this winter term. They take place every Wednesday at 5:15 p.m. More information about the lectures can be found here and the program is available as pdf-file.

I missed the first couple of lectures but fortunately, there are blogging colleagues writing about the event. Here’s what Mandy Schiefner wrote about Peter Baumgartner’s lecture (only in German; English summary below):

“Einen interessanten Punkt fand ich die Autonomie, die nach Baumgartner den Lernenden zugsprochen werden sollte. Die Lernenden sollten nach und nach in die Autonomie entlassen werden.
Zum Beispiel dahingehend, dass Studierende die eigenen Lernumgebung mit aufbauen. Der Dozierende gibt ein grobes Gerüst vor, und Studierende können den Teil integrieren, der ihnen wichtig erscheint. Dazu müssen sie dann meines Erachtens nach auch in einem ersten Schritt wissen, was sie mit der jeweiligen Funktion anstellen wollen: brauchen Sie zusätzliche Diskussionformen, können sie ein Forum integrieren, wollen sie zusammen an einem Lernstoff arbeiten, können sie ein Wiki integrieren. Diese Begründungen müssten sie vorher darlegen. Zu überprüfen wäre dann die Hypothese, dass Studierende diese Formen auch mehr und effektiver nutzen als in einer „vorgegebenen“ Lernumgebung.

Wichtige Erkenntnis von Baumgartner: Neben dem Content sind beim E-Learning immer mehr auch Kommunikations- und Interaktionsstrukturen wichtig und müssen gelernt werden.”

Baumgartner obviously pointed out that the students’ autonomy is crucial and that you should actually be able to participate in developing their own learning environment. This reminds me of the concept of the personal learning environment (PLE) which I mentioned in an earlier post this week. And in fact, the concept of autonomy for learners was already part of Gilly Salmon’s Five-Step-Model of Moderation where the moderator was supposed to take him- or herself back in the more advanced steps of knowledge construction and development.

And, Baumgartner’s other “important insight” (word-by-word translation from German) is that communication and interaction are becoming more important than content in e-learning. This is another point which, in my opinion, has been around for quite a while as well. For example, Baumgartner himself already did a whole presentation on this 1.5 years ago in Brussels. It is, of course, a good point to make anyway.

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In my opinion, Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are the way to go. After having been following the discussion (for example here) for a quite a while, I found this new coverage by Derek Wenmoth via Stephen Downes today. Even though the graphic applies to a school environment, it might be applicable to universities as well.

Here’s Derek’s description of his graphic:

He sees his diagramme “is an attempt to describe thedevelopment and potential intersection of these two systems, ie 1.Personal Learning Environment that is “owned”, managed and maintainedby the individual learner, and 2. Managed Learning Environment that is”owned, managed and maintained by a school or institution.”

I also like this thought of incorporating a Managed Learning Environment (which might also be commercial) and a Personal Learning Environment. I’ll see if I can manage to draw my own graphic during the next weekend.