Multilitteratus Incognitus

What does that spell?  elp-ss-ss ;-) OK...well that sounded more funny in my head... Anyway! Week 5 of NRC01PL (last week! All caught up! yay!) was about Learning Performance Support Systems.  My first introduction to LPSS (a brief one at that) was in an instructional design course almost 10 years ago (if my memory works).  The funny thing is that we did talk about LPSS (without using that label) in a Knowledge Management course while I was doing my MBA.  The lesson here?  Interdisciplinarity is indeed a thing worthwhile practicing! :-) When we learned about LPSS way back when, it was within a corporate learning context. The idea of an LPSS, which in my knowledge management course tied into communities of practice, was that employees, who are also learners, have access to a system to get realtime, just-in-time, help with whatever they are doing.  An example of this might be, for example, a short video on how to print something from your computer to ...

Moving right along with #NRC01PL - this is a (hopefully) short post on Personal Learning Environments, which was the topic of week 4 of NRC01PL.  Maybe this week I can actually catch up  to this week's discussion (although twitter has been surprisingly quiet in this cMOOC). In any case, I love discussing PLEs because in order to meaningfully discuss PLEs we need to discuss the context in which education is happening, and those pre-requisite learner skills and behaviors that I wrote about a little bit in my previous post. So, what are PLEs?  PLEs were defined this week as learning environments where leaders can integrate distributed information, resources, and contacts; and reflect about learning progress and learning products based on standards and interfaces (Schaffert/Kalz, 2010). It's interesting to consider this definition because what we see (well, at least what I see) is a modularization of the learning environment.  As a matter of fact Stephen mention...

On the web, not one knows you are a ____________ (fill in the blank).   Connecting with the previous elements of trust , I am continuing my opening exploration of this module's second topic: Network Fluency.  The introductory chat is available as a YouTube video, and the discussion is on the topic of Social Capital and Personal Learning Networks . This subject of Network Fluency (or Network Literacy as was discussed on Rhizo14†) has come up many times, both in various MOOCs I've been a part of (mostly cMOOCs as it turns out), and in the contexts of instructional design. There is some desire by faculty to include more networked (dare I say "connected") elements in their courses, however the biggest concern is access. Will learners have access to the required technology? Will they want to use this mode of learning? Will they have the skills to use what they need to use? And, when skills come into question, it's been my observation that the skills that pop into m...

Well,  we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing!  This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments (PLE).  Thus, this week the penultimate secret badge has been revealed, and it is the  No Walled Gardens badge. Criteria : The earner of this badge has incorporated at least two Web 2.0 tools and/or services into the design of their LMS-based online course. This design is incorporated in such a way that it should prompt students in that course to start developing their own PLEs. Rationale: Now, I understand that not everyone will be able to incorporate this aspect into their courses, especially the students who are working in corporate training or health-care training and...

I was reading one of the items for this week's CCK11 session, which happens to be on PLEs. The readings was an Educause "7 things you should know about..." type of document. If you don't know what a PLE ( personal learning environment ) is, the abstract gives a good succinct overview: The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.  OK, I agree, but reading the actual document created some cognitive dissonance (you ought to read this document, it's only two pages long). The scenario in this 7things document describes...

This came across my twitter stream today, pretty interesting what you can do with a Prezi (haven't spent much time on Prezi - I suppose I should once I finish Applied Linguistics and I have some more free time on my hands :-) ) Definition of a PLE on Prezi