Tag Archive for 'PLE'

Big hat tip to Gerry Paille for knowing me well enough to realize that the huge Firefox Add-On nut that I am would be extremely excited to learn about a new feature/service for Firefox called “Collections.”

Basically, the Collection part of the site (and the related Add-On Collector Add-On - ha!) allow people to create collections of add-ons, annotate each of the add-ons with commentary, share these with other users who can subscribe to these collections!

So, for instance, if you are interested in some of the key add-ons to help yourself become an Open Educational DJ (ahem) you may want to check out my “Open Educator as DJ” collection which I just published, and better yet, subscribe to it, so that as new tools get added they are pushed to you.

Clearly, the PLE is more than just one tool, more than just the browser, and definitely more than MY use of either of these. But for me, the browser, and the various ways I can pimp it out, are a big component of my workflow as both an educational DJ and network learner, but one which has always been really challenging to share with people. With Firefox Collections, that just got a lot easier. - SWL

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/Open+Educator+as+DJ+(Final)

So I definitely slowed down posting here, committed to only posting when I had something significant to say, but then I don’t seem to be even able to do that? Anyways, I haven’t passed away or anything, indeed I am just back from the fantastic gathering in Utah that was the TTIX conference. Put on by good friends Jared Stein and John Krutsch (amongst other talented folks) this annual FREE conference has much to offer both K-12 and post-secondary educators, and this year included keynotes from myself, Chris Lott and Brian Lamb.

Well, Brian urged us to “Go hard or go home” and I think each of us did in our own ways. Brian delivered another of his great talks on the “Urgency of Open Education,”  a ‘must see.’ And Chris…well Chris nearly brought me to tears with his talk on “The Idea of the Idea.” Far from being the dry talk the title might imply, this was a romp through the history of ideas which ended in a heartfelt plea for a return to deep humanistic teaching, not as a luxury but as an imperative. I strongly urge you to spend the time and effort this talk demands.

And me? Well cowed as I was by these stellar co-speakers, I did my best not to throw up and gesticulated wildly through “The Open Educator as DJ.” I am reasonably happy how it came off, and pleased that I will get at least a second chance at it this fall at the ADL Academic Fest in Madison, Wisconsin. I really did try to show, not just tell (you can see a demo of each of the steps in the workflow here) but ultimately I do think there was too much telling, so I plan to rework that.

I was especially excited to do this talk not only because some good friends had asked me to do a keynote (which always brings up your game) but because for me this talk represents the synthesis of a number of different strands of my work from the past years, bringing together stuff from “Mashups for Non-Programmers,” (2007) “Augmenting OER with Client-Side Tools: A Demonstration” (2007) “The Pros and Cons of Loosely Coupled Teaching,” (2007) “How I learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0,” (2007) “Weaving your own Personal Learning Network,” (2008) “Becoming a Network Learner - Towards a Practice of Freedom,” (2008) and finally “Pimp your Browser” (2009). I’m not citing all of these to show off, but instead because for me this last talk on “the Open Educator as DJ” represents the synthesis of thinking on how OER, PLEs and network learning/loosely-coupled-teaching are initimately related, a synthesis which I did not start with but which I have been groping towards in each new presentation. I keep telling you, I am a SLOW LEARNER!

There was a lot for people to take in; if you don’t want to spend the time going through the talk, you may at least find the resources useful. Ultimately, if there were only 3 things to take away from the talk, I would highlight:

1. clipmarks (and sni.ps) as a critical new method to add to your arsenal which lets you sample and feed individual chunks of the web in a way that still preserves linkability and attribution
2. As I tried to demonstrate with the example of the resources page, the myriad methods available to aggregate and syndicate content wherever you want it to appear
3. the very idea of a network enabled workflow inspired by a metaphor from an existing discipline - as I tried to emphasize in the conclusion, even if the metaphor of “DJ” doesn’t resonate for you, find the one that does, because whether you know it or not, you are already using one, and hopefully by becoming conscious of it, it can become one that helps you to swim in the ever-deepening sea of information that surrounds us.

I think there are lots of holes in this talk, and I am always learning, so please, let me know what you think, what parts don’t resonate for you, and how I can make it better? - SWL

http://www.wikieducator.org/Distributed_Network_Learning_FAQ

If you have presented (or heck, if you have even simply thought about) PLE/PLN/Network Learning, especially to existing educators within formal education, I am sure you have noticed the same sets of questions keep coming up. I know I get the same or similar ones over and over again; so much so that my answers sometimes feel a bit canned, and not always as subtle as they could be. Questions about the new role of the teacher, the changing conception of knowledge; questions on how to make PLEs less complex, whether Network Learning is as effective as ‘conventional’ methods.

On my recent trip to Colombia this seemed especially the case, but maybe I just noticed it because I delivered a similar talk on Network Learning 3 times in 3 days. But the same set of questions kept popping up. So much so that I thought “wouldn’t it be great if there was some sort of Network Learning FAQ where some of these common questions were addressed?”

It didn’t take me long (5 minutes I think) to jump from this to realizing that the best answers to these questions (and indeed the best questions) weren’t to be found in any one place, but instead that most of them had already been asked and answered in a myriad places around the net, in the distributed and ongoing conversation about Network Learning. So the logical step (at least in my addled mind) seemed to be a wiki to collect all of the questions that advocates of Network Learning were repeatedly ask. But instead of short snappy answers, point to some of the best pieces in the blogosphere that have attempted to answer this question. When I put this out in twitter, at least one person also thought it a good idea (and you know what, sometimes one other person is all it takes!)

So, with that small encouragement, I set out to find a place to do this. Wikieducator seemed like a good bet; it’s not affiliated with any single person or institution and yet dedicated to OER, which this will hopefully be. Indeed, a quick search revealed that none other than the inimitable Leigh Blackall already had a page going on ‘Network Learning.’ After a quick check with Leigh that this might be a good place for such a project (and indeed another reality check from a trusted colleague that this wasn’t the worst idea they’d ever heard) I set up a page.

So, what do you think? Is this a dumb idea? Or would you like instead to add to it? Please feel free, that’s kind of the whole idea! It’s just a beginning, but I do hope it will grow. I know there are many, many questions, and well thought out answers (and even better, working code and executions!) out there. Even if you don’t have a link to an answer, please consider adding the question that always occurs to you (or is alwasy asked of you) when discussing Network Learning (or “Connected Learning,” “Connective Knowledge,” “Connectivism,” pick your trope - you’ll notice I rarely use “Connectivism.” I just can’t seem to bring myself to, must have some sort of “anti-ism” gene

Am I re-inventing the wheel here? Please, point me to somewhere else that is doing this. I LOVE using existing materials! Is this not distributed enough? Comments on that and more also appreciated. For me, this is just a selfish exercise to gather together all the good answers I already know are out there, so the next time someone says “You know, this Network Learning sounds interesting, but how do you assess it?” I’ll be able to say, “Hmm, glad you asked, why don’t we take a look over here…” - SWL

http://www.slideshare.net/sleslie/becoming-a-network-learner-presentation

Last week it was my immense honor and privilege to speak with 3 groups of post-secondary educators in Colombia as part of their educamp sessions. Diego Leal invited me to come and do something on “personal learning environments” based on the workshop I had just co-lead a few weeks previously in Phoenix.

The result was this talk (I think there is video of the last version I gave which I will link to when I get it) in which I tried as best I could to capture some of my own struggle to accept that the future is no longer best understood by looking to the past, and my own take on how my relationships with people (and the context we share) informs how I learn with and from them in various tools that make up my PLE.

But, in the spirit of a ‘camp,’ this was not a one-way exchange (hindered though I was by my absolute lack of Spanish, something I very much regret.) I truly learned much from the experience, both about the amazing country of Colombia, but also about how we should be running professional development workshops. The educamps were very inspiring. Every attention to detail had been paid to create the enabling conditions for learner-supported and learner-directed learning to occur.

Each of the three sessions I attended were held in a Conference Centre, and as I understood it, this was both to provide a space with a reliable simulatenous internet connection for sometimes over 100 people, but also to find a space large enough for their camp model.

You see, in these educamps, space design was an integral part. The Ministry of Education (and Cintel, their partner in delivering these camps) had gone to the trouble of purchasing very comfortable (and stylish, I might add) furniture that was trucked

around to each event. This might seem like an indulgence until you experienced how this created an informal room setup, allowing learners to sit near each other, easily form small groups, and move around the room, leading to the kind of self-organizing behaviour one expects in a ‘camp’ session.

Similarly, throughout most of the day, there was a soundsystem playing music in the background. This was not simply ‘filler’ though the presence of background music certainly added to the sense of informality and helped people relax. Instead, the music actually became a ‘cue’ to help prompt people in not too directive a way to consider moving along; every so often the volume level of the music would go up, and over time people started to use this as the cue to perhaps look for a new conversation.

There were many other seemingly “small” details which I think had a profoundly positive impact on the experience for these learners. All learners received a white ‘camp’ shirt at the start, creating a bit of an equal playing field. One of the first acitivites was asking the participants to ‘tag’ themselves with which of the classes of tools (they did not focus on single specific tools but instead general classes, like ‘Readers’ or ’social bookmarking tools’) with which they had experience. In doing this, partly they were making a promise to other learners that if someone came up and asked them about one of their tags, they would talk to them about it.

The morning was then given over to the learners exploring (along with some ‘expert’ help, students with some more experience with specific tools, all wearing red shirts) specific tools or groups of tools that they themselves identified as being of interest to them. The idea was not to master the entire array of technologies (there being at least 12 classes of tools that had been identified) nor master them in any prescribed way or order, but instead to explore ones own need in a hands on way, side-by-side with other learners. It is difficult to describe, but I have NEVER seen this kind of buzz or energy happen in ANY of the dozens of North American “pro D” workshops I have led or been subjected to. Indeed, as I told my hosts, I think the great testament to the success of these events is that, despite the fact that they were already scheduled to run from 8am until 5:30pm, we had to kick people out at 5:30!
You can see more photos from the workshop in this flickr collection. They are not great photos, and to some they might look simply like masses of people milling about. To me, they look like masses of people learning together, from each other and not simply mastering prescribed material but actually forming social networks at the same time as they are learning what they wanted and needed to learn. This was a model which truly understood that while studying may be boring, Learning can be fun (and always personal!) A model I hope I can learn to replicate in the years to come. So thank you, Diego, for letting me experience this, it truly was a great learning experience for me. - SWL

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+workshop

Yesterday it was my IMMENSE privilege to co-facilitate a pre-conference workshop with Jared Stein and Chris Lott on “Weaving your own PLE.” I think for all three of us it was an experiment, developed at a distance through Google docs, wikispaces and a couple of Skype calls. Ultimately, it is up to the participants to judge if it was a success, and the proof will be in how many of them continue on with what they started over that day, but it felt like it went pretty well.

My contribution was a 2 hour session on “Mashing up your PLE.” We had decided to split it into 2 streams, and the (suggested self-)selelction criteria was prior experience reading and writing blogs (and, sort of as an obvious corollary, awareness of RSS.)

(As an aside - we are WELL aware of the issues that surround this approach. We made every effort to emphasize: personal choice; that PLEs involve people and resources not on the network; the PEOPLE are critical, and that they need to grow their OWN networks, not adopt someone else’s; etc. But our goal was to get people who were not swimming in the flow, but who will increasingly be met by students and colleagues who ARE, to start, somewhere, anywhere. To take the plunge, with as many supports as we could muster, in the context of a pre-conference f2f workshop, to sustain it long term.)

I picked 4 “mashup” skills or techniques that I think can help people who already partly immersed in networked learning to be more effective networked learners:

• Re-syndication, Feed Rolling
• Scraping Sites
• Personal/Constrained Search Engines
• Enhancing their Browsing Experience
  

It was a lot to get through in under 2 hours. I know I blew through a lot of stuff and that I often speak too quickly when I present, partly out of nerves, partly for the same reason that I am an exuberant gesticulator - this stuff gets me excited! But I did see lots of eyes lighting up: feed2js always blows people away, you can see the wheels turning of how they can use it; the google spreadsheet “importHTML=” trick works like magic, and while people don’t immediately grok how this is SO much more powerful than importing a page in Excel, when you show them the “More Options” publishing options suddenly you can see the penny drop; I think I sold a few people on “constrained search engines” but it’s Google Coop On-the-Fly that really gets the jaws dropping; and finally, both OER Recommender and the WorldCat/Amazon greasemonkey script provide pretty vivid examples of how you can bring educational resources directly INTO your everyday web experience with NO EXTRA EFFORT!

My only regret is that in my current position (and in my current practice) I typically only get to do these kind of sessions once before I move on. Which is a shame, because in this particular case I have a ton of ideas of how to improve it. For instance, taking a leave out of Alan (and many others’) book, I realized that if I had connected there 4 pieces in more of a story, it would make it more compelling. And in terms of making it educationally more effective, I think that forming the room into small groups, showing them a number of different techniques in each of these areas, and then setting them a problem to solve together (e.g. “figure out how to scrape this site. Feel free to use Google spreadsheets, Yahoo pipes, Dapper, or any other method you think will work”) would make this way more memorable and effective. But ultimately require more time.

Anyways, this was a ton of fun to work on if only to once again get a chance to work through some ideas and practice of my own, which is ultimately what keeps driving me to do new presentations each time, they are one of my only “teaching” opportunities I have right now and allow me to work out stuff that I’d otherwise not get a chance to dig into. - SWL 

http://www.netvibes.com/wcet08

Partly as an exercise in personal autonomy (we’re doing a workshop on “Personal Learning Environments” so what better way than to walk the talk) and partly just in a fit of pique that the conference itself wasn’t already doing something, I created this netvibes page to aggregate the activity from the on-going WCET conference in Phoenix. It took about 30 minutes to put it together (except for the scraping of the conference schedule, which took 3 minutes once Tony Hirst showed me how to do it with the =importHtml function in Google spreadsheets - thanks Tony!)

I sent it round WCET and everyone seemed impressed, and we showed it in our PLE Workshop yesterday, but alas I fear I have given birth to a non-life supporting planet. You see - there is NO CONFERENCE WIFI. I am sitting in a session right now on “Disruptive Innovations” with about 30 people in it, and mine is the only laptop out (N.B. I was ‘permitted’ to use the secret back-door account, which despite my desire to protest in solidarity, I cannot help but make use of.) So the lingr backchannel that Chris set up is likely not going to see a lot of action, nor don’t expect a whole lot of tweets on the #wcet08 channel (despite the fact that there are at least 8 active twitter users here that I know of, plus many whom I don’t know yet). Sigh. Anyways, for those at the conference who do get online through the overpriced connections in their room, here you go, Planet WCET’08. Feels a bit like Pluto… - SWL

…I’ll hopefully have the materials finished for the pre-conference workshop on Personal Learning Environments I am leading along with Chris Lott and Jared Stein at this years’ WCET Conference. If not, I figure I’m always good for a bit of song and dance (though I must admit I’ve always been more fond of Isaac Hayes’ version):

The day is shaping up, though, to be a good one. We are going to try two streams. The first, mainly led by Chris, is for people new to blogging, RSS and syndication techniques (as these seem fundamental to many people’s notion of a PLE). The second, which Jared and I will share, is split between “Growing Your Network by Moving Your Office Online” and my session on Mashing up your PLE.The sessions will be very hands on, the hope being that people walk away with their PLE tuned up and more able to accomodate this method of network learning in both their own practice and with their students.

If you are planning on attending the WCET conference, consider joining us for this full day session on the Wednesday, November 5th. If the past is any indicator, it will be a funky good time in Phoenix that day. - SWL

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nessman/2590572476/ 

The exercise to collect as many PLE diagrams as I could was not an end in itself, as interesting as that might have been. In doing that, I was hoping to learn from how people conceived of their PLEs and use this as the basis for an attempt to illustrate my own PLE.
Looking at the collection, what struck me was that there were 3 main ways people oriented their PLE diagrams: by tools, by uses, or by people. I added a table of contents to the top of the wiki page that organized the diagrams around these orientations.

There are a few (interesting to me) outliers there as well, ones that combined a number of these orientations into a single diagram. These appealed to me, because I don’t see a PLE, even my own specific one, as being just a single set of tools; we do choose a specific set of tools, but often replace them with others that fulfill a function better. But in addition to the tools and the functions, an important aspect to me is the different ways we can use these tools based on levels of trust/online identity & reputation. That’s why the slogan “PLE is People” isn’t just a joke, funny though it might be.
So with that in mind I set to using my limited drawing skills to visualize my PLE in a way that captured not just the tools, but the uses and the trust relationships as well. I’m hoping the diagram is self explanatory (otherwise, well, what was the point!) but a few explanations:

• the circles extending outwards from the centre represent different levels of trust/relationships. They are dotted lines on purpose - these are not fixed; relationships change, you get to know some people better etc.
• the two headed arrows are meant to express the flow of information and learning - it is not all one way. You *can* just read blogs. You *can* just use del.icio.us without using it socially and following others. But I have always maintained that if we view these as actions (’blogging’ instead of just ‘blogs’) it helps us understand they as conversations, as the “read/write” particpatory web.

Please have a look. Would love to hear some feedback. Does this help illustrate the practice of a PLE any better? This is another one of my diagrams that percolated in the back (and I really do mean the back) of my brain for a while and then last week the specific way to visualize it just popped into my mind. I am not a great artist, indeed, every time I do a diagram like this it reinforces my need to better master a drawing tool (this was done in powerpoint!!!). And while others have ridiculed the term PLE’s in the past as being “just a bunch of drawings” I think that misses the point. A PLE is clearly not just a set of drawings, but the act of producing such a drawing, such a conceptualization, is an incredibly valuable one, not just for any educational technologist but indeed, I’d argue, for any learner, regardless of whether they conceive of it as a “PLE” or not. Knowing how you learn, and how you conceive of the structures and relationships that support your learning, is an important step to becoming a master learner. - SWL

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams

As part of preparations for a workshop this fall on ‘building your own PLE’ I am collecting diagrams of people’s personal learning environments on this wiki page (or even images illustrating how they conceive of them at a purely conceptual level). I do not want to “boil them down” or reduce them all to the same “thing,” but along the lines of asking what “postures” make up people’s PLEs, I am looking for ways to make a complicated idea/practice more easy to understand for newcomers.

I’m hoping this page will be useful to others. Certainly, I was assisted by a number of people who had aggregated PLE resources, including this extensive wiki. If you feel like adding your own to the list, leave a comment here, or follow the instructions on the wiki page (or just email them to me). - SWL

Just now a silly argument broke out in twitter concerning the acronym “PLE” that I wanted to follow up on. I say “silly” because it was the classic “It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to turn their backs rather than learning to surf (to borrow metaphors from a bunch of people whom regular readers and blogosphere denizens will recognize on their own).

And I’m not proposing to re-open this debate here (but maybe I am), instead I have a question for you.

What are the various “postures” by which you understand your own orientation/embeddeness to/in your own personal learning environment (network, whatever!)?

Let me explain a little more of what I mean. I broadly collect my own actions on my learning network, the tools I use, the uses I make of them, and the people that comprise it as well, into three broad “postures”, or ways of relating. For me these are, at a high level,

1. reading/consuming information, content, reflection, etc,
2. producing/creating information, content, reflection, etc,
3. weaving together components, people and conversations on the network, and activity that surely encompasses the former two but also has some distinct aspects to it in and of itself.

Now I don’t think these are exhaustive nor even particularly well conceived, but they are the buckets into which I sub-consciously find myself putting my various activities. And what I am interested in finding out from all of you is, at this high level, what “postures” you see yourself as having in relationship to your learning network, your networked learning, your practice. Are there others you would add to this list or do you have a totally different way of conceptualizing this?

I believe, again without a lot to substantiate it, that you all do indeed have many other ways of organizing and conceptualizing  this. But are these all entirely idiosyncratic? Well, to the extent to which we can still talk about “categories” and to the extent to which ideas like “learning styles” still have any meaning, my sense is that we can tease out a number of different “postures,” and a number of different ways to relate these postures, and use these as the entree with which to orient newcomers to weaving their own “personal” learning environments. Certainly these will be personal in the sense of being oriented around them, and certainly be personal in the sense of including different tools, content sources and conversations than mine or yours might. But to argue that we cannot evolve some ways of talking about generally how we orient ourselves to our own PLEs is I think to embark on a solipsistic road that doesn’t resemble the one I find myself on.

So what do you think? Is there a sense in which we can use this notion of “postures” (again, feel free to suggest a better term) as a conceptual entree to helping new people weave their own PLEs, or is this already to reify it. Will it always only be a case of each of us modelling our individual practices, with whatever pieces and conceptions of them resonating individually with each person who sees them. - SWL

(P.S. I am certain this post belies my thoroughly amateur status, that there is lots of nomenclature in the learning sciences that better describes what I am fumbling with here. Please feel free to educate me on it. I do not need tot invent terms where better ones already exist. Like I keep telling you, I am a slow learner).