PLE Short Rundown

Thankyou to all who have participated in some way or another to this blog and my associated wiki over the course of this semester. This has been my first blog and I have found it invaluable in collecting in one online environment my thoughts and related resources to, not only material pertaining to the Flexible Learning Environments subject, but also material, videos, quotes and artwork that I find interesting and inspiring in general. During the course of the semester I have had to master technological skills that I had not previously used in my previous educational experience and this PLE helped serve and a focal point for several of these skills. Particularly helpful was the capacity to embed video clips from Youtube, as this was the method we used in our VLE peer review to post instructional videos we made onto the blog after we had created them and uploaded them onto Youtube. The ability to have everything linked together on this PLE, as well as this PLE linked to other blogs and wiki's, is definitely an important skill for educators of the future, and I plan on continuing to maintain this blog as well as my wiki into the future. This blog has been used mainly as a resource centre for all the interesting material I have found over the semester, as well as to serve as a working link to colleagues PLE's. It is great to be able to collect online resources all in one place and to have easy and convenient access to everything everybody else is doing. The wiki I created, whose link can be found in a previous post on this blog, is designed to serve as a repository for ideas and information related to the interface between Geometry and Art in Education. This is something I am passionately interested in and I hope that in the future the knowledge and skills I have gained in this subject will enable the sharing of resources by an online community of students and educators with like-minded values and goals.

'What Teachers Make'

This guy is a teacher turned slam poet who is a vocal advocate of the 'nobility of teaching'. His goal is to create 1,000 new teachers through 'poetry, persuasion and perseverance'. His name is Taylor Mali and he is worth a look.

MICROBLOGGING

The 7 Things We should Know about Microblogging

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutMicro/174629

FLE NING

I joined the Flexible Learning Environments Ning. My page can be found at http://flexiblelear.ning.com/profile/JulianLumb

Anyone heard of Jaron Lanier

I read a book by this guy last year. Thought it was worth mentioning him as he is somewhat of a cyber-philosopher/critic. He is a computer scientist and has some interesting criticisms of current cyber-culture in general, including criticisms of Social Objects (SO's) and social networking sites. He encourages people to create their own blogs from the ground up and not rely on pre-made formats for their online identities. He acknowledges that many of his opinions are not shared by his collegues.




His criticism aims at several targets which are at different level of abstraction:

* any attempt to create one final authoritative bottleneck which channels the knowledge onto society is wrong, regardless whether it is a Wikipedia or any algorithmically created system producing meta informations,
* sterile style of wiki writing is undesirable because:
o it removes the touch with the real author of original information, it filters the subtlety of his opinions, essential information (e.g. incl. graphical context of original sources) is lost,
o it creates the false sense of authority behind the information,
* collective authorship tends to produce or align to mainstream or organizational beliefs,
* he worries that collectively created works may be manipulated behind the scene by anonymous groups of editors who bear no visible responsibility,
o and that this kind of activity might create future totalitarian systems as these are basically grounded on misbehaved collectives which oppress individuals.


NOTE: the above dot points are taken from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier). Funnily enough I don't think this source of information would be something that approved of by the aforementioned author.

Critics Battle Over Online Learning

Here is a link to page that has several links to articles presenting some perspectives of online learning, some quite critical of the direction of technology in education.

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americas/July-08/Critics-Battle-Over-Online-Learning.html

This is a great video. Very optimistic and exciting, an important video for the educators of the future. It ties in strongly with our conversations regarding Social Objects (SO's) and Learning Objects (LO's) and gives examples of the kind of large scale projects being undertaken at the moment to use technology to transform education. Some great ideas for technology in maths education towards the end.