I was writing an “essay” that referenced and quoted from other entries on this same site. I decided to call this sort of entry an excursion, since it provided a guided tour through a selected part of the topography of this site.
There is no clear standard for judging what constitutes a virtual learning environment. The term has been used to brand everything from a set of collaborative desktop tools to a fully immersive virtual world. Perhaps, then, we should choose a different starting point, and concentrate on asking questions that will allow us to decide whether a specific self-described VLE will be suitable for our needs or not.
Recently Ralf pointed me towards the idea of barcamps, which have their own web site and their own online rules. This has the great merit of providing a reference point for what we have been doing in an unlabelled way.
Ralf skyped me yesterday to point out that I was being blogged about.
A brief biography for people who want something for web sites and conference leaflets.
The idea of representing ideas or thoughts diagrammatically is not a recent one. However the current usages of the terms “mind mapping” and “concept mapping” are relatively recent.
We have just had a two-way video conference with George Siemens in Manitoba. He gave a talk that I need to think more about. It seemed to me to be very problematic in some key areas, particularly in the area of truth.
3D is better than 2D because people are not frogs. That is something that Jakob Nielsen wrote in November 1998, and I still think almost everything he wrote is valid today.
In this essay I will look at several aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking and seek to relate it to the current cultural environment: one in which information is transmitted and received instantaneously, and stored at a distance, in amounts unthinkable even two decades ago. I will briefly attempt to place McLuhan’s cultural commentary within a political framework drawn from the writings of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire.
Marinetta is the capital city of Rosario, a fictitious island situated in the Mediterranean Sea. It is also the title of an ongoing educational multimedia project that began in June 2002 and is intended to last for a minimum of five years.
A four-day seminar in Helsinki, for students on the European epedagogy masters course.
There is an additional navigational need for this site. It concerns the question of how a set of linked pages can be seen to form a larger piece.
On the BBC news web site Michael Geist (who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law) has written an…
Some preliminary thoughts on combining the functionality of blogs and wikis, that attempts to look the question “why would you do it?” in the eyes without blinking.
This is the outline for a project for the course ePedagogy: Issues Management / Strategic Specialisation. It was written by Owen Kelly & Camie Lindeberg in June 2006, and revised in August 2006.
About two years ago I began to ask how the students’ home pages could be used as a pedagogical resource. I began to look at how other institutions fared, with a view to surveying the possibilities and presenting a plan of action; and it was here that this project began.
Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises: issues that I may want to think about more deeply sometime soon.
John Connell has written an interesting piece about the relationship between pedagogy and technology. He posits the existence of something called Learning 2.0, which he decides is “an inadequate term in many ways, but useful shorthand nonetheless”.
I have been reading an ebook called Learning Spaces that “focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces”. Here is a link to the downloadable version.
This is the thesis, published directly from Scribd. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.
This is the thesis, published directly from Zoho. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
This is the part of the final report of an eighteen month research project.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
My thesis – Memi: a tool for cultural democracy – was “finished” last month, which is to say that it arrived at a point where I felt I could show it to people without leaving the room. It was accepted, and last Friday I walked on stage at LUME and received my MA certificate. You can read the thesis here, courtesy of Scribd or Zoho. You can also download a copy from Box.net.
This is a trail through entries in this web site that, taken together, constitute the core elements of a thesis for an MA in epedagogy at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.
The Microlearning Page on Wikipedia is a good starting point for understanding what this emergent concept is actually being used for. Here are some other links too.
Broadly speaking there are two approaches to navigating through a large store of information. I have deliberately used both strategies on this site.
Ralf Apelt has just posted an entry in his blog that leads to an interesting slide show about personal learning environments that he found at Slideshow.
A short note about some decisions that we agreed with Stefan prior to the Hamburg epedagogy conference.
Jutta and I have been talking with Pluti and others recently about the idea of moving some of the technical teaching we do from face-to-face lessons to podcasts. Now Neulio has appeared, offering us both a wide range of existing material and a publishing platform for our own.
The site has scarcely been updated since the end of June. I managed to upload several posts from India but none of the accompanying photographs – and indeed none of the re-edited prose. Early this morning I reloaded the amended versions of the Goa pieces, so they make at least some sense now.
This afternoon was a time for group tasks. The group that I joined consisted of Christina, Ralf, and Suvi. Our given task was to discuss the topic “Scale-free networks: the realm of the social”; decide what it meant and how it related to the overall themes of the seminar; make a presentation to the whole group on our thoughts; and finish with a proposal for a future project based upon these thoughts.
Follies and Fallacies in Medicine has been unfairly forgotten, but it is available as a free download from the Skrabanek Foundation.
Ralf has posted to the epedagogy blog∞ in response to my posts about this site. He suggested that perhaps SnipSnap∞ might be an off-the-shelf solution to our bliki needs.
There are crucial differences between MySpace and Bebo on the one hand, and Facebook on the other. Although the three are often lumped together, I have come to think that Facebook has very different possibilities – ones which could be usefully used in educational contexts, and particularly as a background platform for immersive learning.
I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.
On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.
Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.
I looked at the TikiWiki documentation yesterday and realised that I had been right to stay with WikkaWiki! Not that there was anything wrong with TikiWiki. Indeed it looks like a magnificient piece of software.
Wired online has an article about wikis that is itself created as a wiki. This is not the most interesting thing about it though.
This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.
Jane McGonigal gave a keynote speech titled “The future of collective play: Fostering collaboration, network literacy and massively multiplayer problem-solving through alternate-reality games,” at the Serious Games Summit of the Game Developers Conference yesterday.
Yesterday I alerted everyone on who reads the WE in e-pedagogy∞ blog to the fact that this site was (finally) online. Ralf∞ responded almost immediately, asking where the trackback features were. This made me remember something interesting, so I went off to track it down.
Ralf A posited ELGG as an interesting alternative to VLEs, in answer to a point that I raised about whether VLEs should be replaced by VLNs (where the N stands for network).
I have just spent a week at the 21st Annual WCET conference, where Steve Bronack and I did an afternoon workshop on virtual worlds and education. The workshop was co-sponsored by Innovate, which sadly closed its doors to…
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Looking at the raw material from which this site is composed, I find myself asking: which parts are the blog-stuff and which parts are the wiki-stuff?
Stefan mentioned the ideas behind wikimap this afternoon, and I had to confess that I had never heard of it.
The MaMaMedia site is a very interesting example of a visionary resource. Among the many and varied contents are a series of articles by Seymour Pappert. In one of them entitled The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing, he wrote about a girl discovering the power of zero.
I had been discussing our uses of Zoho with Arvind, and he (and various blog postings) had been offering glimpses of an all-new, all-shiny future at Zoho. They had promised that they were introducing two new services called Zoho Business and Zoho Education, and both seemed to be applicable to what we have been doing at Arcada. I wanted to see them in action.
