Is anybody out there? there? there? PLE-ase

[Leigh Blackall]

Derek Wenmoth points to a new Podcast being put out by Graham Attwell with an episode on the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) thinking about whether they are even needed. Basically Graham is restating what has already been said to death here on many occasions.

I was beginning to think no one was out there on this one. I mean I have really shouted out before about LMS, ePortfolios and PLEs, and how I think they are a great waste of time! Google search on my name and you'll see its what I stand for, like it or not. - but I don't get the feedback, or any sign that any one's listening... apart from a Google search result... but enough of that winging guff, perhaps I should be happy that this podcast is enough, perhaps I should reflect on the way I say things and that being a possible reason I don't get come backs. Perhaps the fact that Derek has taken notice of it is enough of an indication that the word is spreading.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license .

--
Posted by Leigh Blackall to Teach and Learn Online at 4/19/2006 06:35:00 PM

--
--
Would you like to buy my book? http://www.lulu.com/leighblackall
--
Leigh Blackall
+64(0)34780079
skype - leigh_blackall
http://leighblackall.wikispaces.org/

[Michael Coghlan]

Well I'm out there listening Leigh. And I just wanna say how much I'm enjoying this list. I should've joined ages back. The leads you folks provide and the quality of discussion here is fantastic.

Leigh - in your rant about PLE's can you clarify something for me? Do you include ELGG as a PLE? Or are PLE's more something people want to create to corral people into a controllable space? Like an LMS for individuals? Or is that sort of what ELGG already is? Forgive me if these are obvious questions to other TALOS, but I'm still catching up here.

- Michael

[Craig Bottomley]

hey michael

could you explain ELGG for a dummy who just cant work it out for himself?

botts

[Sean FitzGerald]

One of the problems with the whole Personal Learning Environment (PLE) debate is that some people use the term to describe loosely joined distributed tools, while others use it to describe software - like Elgg - which tries to incorporate many of those tools in the one place.

Sean

-- 

Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
-- William Wallace from the movie "Braveheart"

[Leigh Blackall]

ELGG to me is a relatively small scale attempt to capture tools that offer the potential for being networked, and offer them up in the one, semi intergrated, interoperable system... in other words yes - another LMS - in that it can only freeze frame what's available now, and limits what you can do, or what you'd want to do. Sean used ELGG for his blog recently, personally I tool one look at it and saw and ELGG thing Now Sean uses a Wordpress and I see more of Sean in it. We talked about this a bit Sean and I I'm hoping Sean will share with us he's experiences and thoughts about it.

In a post to my blog a while back: ePortfolios - who needs them, I pointed to another's presentation to indicate my frustration with the attention being given to this pretentious word (to use Bill's description of ePortfolios) that essentially describes what is already being built by users of the Web2 anyway... all an ePortfolio should be from an educational stand point is a lesson plan designed to help people take control and ownership of their online identities and use as much as they need from what is available to them on the web, NOT limited by what is available to them based on a system selected by the school. Real world learning... therefore life long learning...

Graham Wagner pulls me up saying that ePortfolio is just a word but I don't see it like that. I see it as a conceptual limitation giving teachers a comfortable area in which to sit and say "yes we get web2, we're with it" but really they're not even scratching the right turf! Are they comfortable swaping and changing services do they have it in them yet to try new things? is publishing to the Internet something they couldn't live without? Do they rate Blogging or MySpacing as ligit ePortfolios? If not, why not? If so, why use a word like ePortfolio?

[brent]

Leigh: I haven't listened to Graham's podcast yet (broadband still
coming!)... but i've revisited your earlier posts and as you know i've
weighed in at times but I'm still kind of on the fence about it all. I
think my issue is that it still sounds a little like "Moodle Bad,
Google Good" to me. While we would readily accept that there's no one
size fits all, aren't there really situations when Moodle is more
appropriate than say Google + a free wiki? I'm also quite hesitant as
well about just leaving all the innovation to the private sector. While
the new work by the JISC crew on PLEX
(http://reload.ces.strath.ac.uk/plex/) or ELGG (http://www.elgg.net)
might not be everyone's cup of tea, there's some incredibly interesting
technical approaches to directing new internet APIs and protocols
towards educational purposes going on in these projects (ATOM
publishing protocol in PLEX, FOAF in ELGG). Is there a place for
pedagogical applications and innovation in software? Should
universities and the like not be making software? Why is this not an
area for pedagogical innovation?

brent.
http://exelearning.org/

[Leigh Blackall]

Hi Brent:

I'm not sure if you're serious about the Google good Moodle bad thing, but if you are then I'd better address that straight away...

In detail I use Google for my email, and my blog... I've started using its calendar but am nervous about having too many things with Google, so am sticking with RSS calendar. I use Yahoo for Flickr and Del.icio.us. I use YouTube for video and back that and other media up with OurMedia. I use Wikispaces and Writely (now sadly another Google product) for document authoring, and Lulu for printing and publishing printed material.. and good ol Bloglines to keep track of everything... I don't use Moodle because I don't own - nor do I want to pay for and maintain a server, and with all the web based options I just don't need it. In short I have learnt how to opperate comfortably and productively and I think securely ina real world context. Hope that clarifies that I'm not at all saying Google good, Moodle bad. I'm actually saying one thing bad, many things (free and easy) good.

I'm also quite hesitant as well about just leaving all the innovation to the private sector.

This point is where I struggle the most. I agree that we should publicly sponsor research and development, even though at the moment the developments in the education sectors seem distracted, miss guided, and quite simply reinventing wheels in the most expensive ways imaginable... but more to the point, I don't think ICT R&D spending should be at the expense of people learning first how to effectively operate in the "real world" and if that's a commercialised and horribly want driven world, then so be it, but there is a free and open world rising...

When I see 100's of millions of pub ed dollars being invested in LMS and other same diff development (portals, sharable learning content development, DRM, walled gardens), at the expense of every teacher and student having access to a well networked tablet, and resulting in the majority of teachers still afraid and ignorant about Internet as they were 10 years ago, and the kids left to learn for themselves, pirating, downloading viruses, being assaulted with spam and porn... than I tend to blame inappropriate spending on ICTs mistaking its priorities.

OK, Moodle is a great way to get a Department saving 10 of thousands on otherwise commercial systems, and it does offer kids an opportunity to learn code - don't get me wrong - steps towards open source open content is important to push for, but in the end I see Moodle the same as any LMS... a replication of the classroom, safely stored on school servers, not integrated with real world applications, and given teachers and schools a chance to keep being the bricks-in-the-wall that they always were. Even though ELGG is integrated with real world apps, ask your average kid on the street what ELGG or Moodle is and there's your answer as to why we shouldn't bother - especially when we know deep down that what that kid is using, or what is already out there is the same if not better than ELGG and Moodle anyway!

On 4/21/06, brent <pumic...@gmail.com> wrote:

Leigh: I haven't listened to Graham's podcast yet (broadband still
coming!)... but i've revisited your earlier posts and as you know i've
weighed in at times but I'm still kind of on the fence about it all. I
think my issue is that it still sounds a little like "Moodle Bad,
Google Good" to me. While we would readily accept that there's no one
size fits all, aren't there really situations when Moodle is more
appropriate than say Google + a free wiki? I'm also quite hesitant as
well about just leaving all the innovation to the private sector. While
the new work by the JISC crew on PLEX

( http://reload.ces.strath.ac.uk/plex/) or ELGG (http://www.elgg.net)

might not be everyone's cup of tea, there's some incredibly interesting
technical approaches to directing new internet APIs and protocols
towards educational purposes going on in these projects (ATOM
publishing protocol in PLEX, FOAF in ELGG). Is there a place for
pedagogical applications and innovation in software? Should
universities and the like not be making software? Why is this not an
area for pedagogical innovation?


brent.
http://exelearning.org/

[Sean FitzGerald]

Elgg isn't an LMS in my book. LMSes are teacher and course centred. Elgg is user, or in the educational context - student, centred. The user/student can build their identity around their online presence in a way they can't in an LMS.

Having said that, I agree when an institution installs Elgg on it's servers there are problems.

The first is that it limits what students can say and do as they have to abide by the institution's usage policy, which means students don't have complete freedom and autonomy.

The other problem would be only having access to the data for the duration of the course, which is a real problem. Hopefully one day, once institutions have warmed to the idea of blogs and a student-centred approach they might provide lifelong blogs/eportfolios. My university provides lifelong email addresses, so it may be a reality one day.

I think we are in a transitional phase, and if institutions are willing to adopt software that has social networking functionality and supports a student-centred pedagogy, then I'm not going to complain about that. I wouldn't support it, but I wouldn't complain about it either. It's a step in the right direction, and one away from LMSes (including Moodle).

The Elgg template can be tweaked to add linkrolls, blogrolls, del.icious link rolls and/or tag cloud, flickr badges, frappr maps, rss feeds etc. just like any other blog, so in itself it's a viable choice to use as the centre of a personal learning environment (I'm using the definition of a PLE as loosely coupled distributed tools). Providing institutions don't cripple the capacity to tweak the template, then students could have this as well.

I do believe that Elgg are working on a click-and-drag interface to make it easy to add these external elements without having to know html and tweak the template. This has to be a plus for students. Not everyone can be bothered doing the template-tweaking thang.

What the service Elgg.net provides is no different to any other service like Blogger, Livejournal, MySpaces etc. And like those other services it adds a range of social networking tools that would suit some people, but not others.

The reason I moved away from Elgg.net wasn't because I couldn't get it to reflect my character. If I'd spent more time tweaking the template and the CSS I could probably have got it looking pretty good.

The reason I moved away from Elgg.net was that, because of the people who are attracted to that community, it has a very strong bias towards elearning, and, for personal reasons, I didn't want to be part of that community. It doesn't have to be that way btw - there are other people using Elgg.net for other reasons, but not enough to take away the bias of the culture at this stage. I chose for myself to set up my own Wordpress blog on my own server and build up my own community using my own tools. The down side is that you don't have automatic readership and community that comes with Elgg.net (or other social software services for that matter).

It's worth noting that the elgg software can be taken and installed on any server and set up another community. It could be generic, it could be geared towards youth, it could be a community of bee keepers!

I applaud the attempt of a group of people working in conjunction with educators to be thinking about what sort of tools will work in an educational context. Some of the lessons learned then may even feed back into existing services. For example, wouldn't it be great if Blogger picked up drag-and-drop for integrating other tools/services into the sidebar?

I think the term "eportfolio" has been around well before blogging, and it's often use to make the idea more palatable to educators. At the end of the day, all an eportfolio is is a blog with built-in file storage for assignments - words docs, ppt presentations etc.

In a sense there is no reason why Blogger (with additional services) or MySpace can't be called an eportfolio, but as the distinction breaks down between traditional eportfolios and social software, the term is getting a bit dated, may be even redundant, and may be perpetuating an artificial distinction.

However there still is "eportfolio" software being developed, but if students are given lifelong access to "eportfolio" software installed within the institution, or the eportfolios are placed on the open web, then I think that's a viable option.

Sean

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles.
Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are
battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who
are at times greater than illustrious heroes.
-- Victor Hugo

[Leigh Blackall]

Nice post Sean.. even stevens

[Bill Kerr]

hi leigh, graham, others,

i looked up graham's site yesterday but couldn't find that comment I made about eportfolios being "pretentious" - I do remember making it but it was qualified as a personal comment, something like, "I feel the term is pretentious" wasn't trying to pass an authoritive judgment

was the exchange b/w you and graham by private email or is there an URL?

my thoughts about this issue are still fuzzy - i tend to think that in a general sense teaching won't be reformed from within despite our desire to achieve this - teaching is the last cottage industry

the car industry did not evolve out of the horse and carriage industry but replaced it

I just try to avoid systems specifically designed for teachers because I suspect they are limited in some way - sanitised, filtered, short lived, under school control - but don't have time to check them all out in detail - hence I have avoided moodle but just about all of the comments I have heard about it are positive so I might be wrong, just don't know

Darren K is doing some great classroom based work to demonstrate that it is far better to be our there in the big ocean - he is organising comments to his students blogs from afar
http://adifference.blogspot.com/2006/03/encouraging-excellence.html

George Siemens has written a paper criticising LMS but I haven't studied it properly
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lms.htm

Sorry, this is a hopelessly underprepared and rushed contribution to the discussion - not sure whether I will have time to follow up, just seem very  rushed with other priorities at the moment (I noticed that graham had 3 or 4 posts about eportfolios on his blog but  didn't study them)
- Bill
--
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://beam.to/billkerr
skype: billkerr2006

On 4/20/06, Leigh Blackall <leighb...@gmail.com > wrote:

ELGG to me is a relatively small scale attempt to capture tools that offer the potential for being networked, and offer them up in the one, semi intergrated, interoperable system... in other words yes - another LMS - in that it can only freeze frame what's available now, and limits what you can do, or what you'd want to do. Sean used ELGG for his blog recently, personally I tool one look at it and saw and ELGG thing Now Sean uses a Wordpress and I see more of Sean in it. We talked about this a bit Sean and I I'm hoping Sean will share with us he's experiences and thoughts about it.

In a post to my blog a while back: ePortfolios - who needs them , I pointed to another's presentation to indicate my frustration with the attention being given to this pretentious word (to use Bill's description of ePortfolios) that essentially describes what is already being built by users of the Web2 anyway... all an ePortfolio should be from an educational stand point is a lesson plan designed to help people take control and ownership of their online identities and use as much as they need from what is available to them on the web, NOT limited by what is available to them based on a system selected by the school. Real world learning... therefore life long learning...

--
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://beam.to/billkerr
skype: billkerr2006

[Sean FitzGerald]

I followed the link Bill provided about Darren K using blogs with his calculus class. He points to some comments that Lani - a voluntary mentor - gave to his students. This led me to this, which I thought was quite beautiful:

Lessons from Geese

Fact 1:

As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a "V" formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

Lesson:

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

---

Fact 2:

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

Lesson:

If we have as much sense as a goose, we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

---

Fact 3:

When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into the formation, and another goose flies to the point position.

Lesson:

It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other's skills, capabilities and unique arrangements of gifts, talents or resources.

---

Fact 4:

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

Lesson:

We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, the production is much greater. The power of encouragement (to stand by one's heart or core values and encourage the heart and core of others) is the quality of honking we seek.

---

Fact 5:

When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock.

Lesson:

If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

 

from the work of Milton Olson

submitted by Randy Hadfield

Source: http://www.uensd.org/USOE_Pages/Char_ed/char_ed_old/chbldr/stories/geese.html

-- 

Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration
of man's superiority to all that befalls him.    
-- Romain Gary (French Writer)

[Leigh Blackall]

Hey Bill, no URL but G did say you said it in a comment to my blog... if you didn't say it (there's no URL ;) I stake claim to it :) I said it!!!

Graham has stuck it out with me and helped me to appreciate what Sean had also been saying... that ePortfolio is a. just a concept or method for the use of Web2 technologies or b. A proprietary software system being sold to schools and universities.

a. I accept.
b. I wanna blow to kingdom come.

My worry is that talking in terms of a. which only serves to replace web2 terminology with safer more old school terminology, will lead some dill brains (and there's plenty of them around in school) into thinking ePortfolio is something different/better than web2 stuff, and that they should go out and buy buy buy, force force force their staff and students to use their system...

[Leigh Blackall]

That sure is something wonderful Sean. Did you keep the direct URL?

[Sean FitzGerald]

At ze bottom of ze page.  :-D

Sean

Leigh Blackall wrote:

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Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents, but rather because its opponents die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck

[Leigh Blackall]

Oh yes.. so it was >_<

-- Sean FitzGerald Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291 Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342 Skype: seamusy Email: se...@tig.com.au Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/ Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck

[peter allen]

ok warm fuzzy over......http://archives.stupidquestion.net/sq6602.html

sorry

[grahamwegner]

Bill, the quote I referenced to Leigh on his blog is the comment you
left on a this post on my blog
<http://gwegner.edublogs.org/2006/02/19/future-directions-for-south-oz-e-portfolios/>
I was using it as a way of illustrating that he was not the only
educator discontent with the term "e-portfolio". I did not mean for it
to sound as if you used in an authoriative way so my apologies if that
came out wrong. BTW, it's about time I joined this discussion group - I
actually thought I needed an invite to be involved in TALO. I certainly
might learn a thing or two here.

[Bill Kerr]

no need to apologise graham, no one is offended - thanks for the link - good to see you on TALO
- Bill

[Bronwyn Hegarty]

really nice Sean

 here's another one from someone who has geese.

a goose can sit on its eggs week after week long after they should have hatched, hoping for the miracle. Too long and the eggs explode, not long enough and they die. How to get the timing just right.

 

we seem to do this with colleagues ..some just don't get it and we saturate them until they go off, others don't get enough nuturing so never actually get it . Maybe we need to relook at how much support is ideal to help colleagues hatch their ideas.

Bron
 

On 4/22/06, Sean FitzGerald <se...@tig.com.au> wrote:

[brent]

> When I see 100's of millions of pub ed dollars being invested in LMS and
> other same diff development (portals, sharable learning content development,
> DRM, walled gardens), at the expense of every teacher and student having
> access to a well networked tablet, and resulting in the majority of teachers
> still afraid and ignorant about Internet as they were 10 years ago, and the
> kids left to learn for themselves, pirating, downloading viruses, being
> assaulted with spam and porn... than I tend to blame inappropriate spending
> on ICTs mistaking its priorities.

Leigh:

You seem to be coming at this with the notion of a 'digital divide' -
the solution to which is to throw a bunch of networked tablets at
teachers and students and let the 'network' (aka: the market) sort
everything out!? The only thing that that approach ever did was make
rich/modernist societies/governments feel better about themselves and
perpetuate the idea that all things can be cured if we just throw
technology/$ at it. The same arguments existed during the rise of
television, which can be broken down into two waves of firstly
broadcast tv, and then cable during the 70's and 80's. During this
extended "revolution" the medium was promised to realise democracy,
bring world peace and social harmony, and television was going to be
the new tool for transforming the educational system. (see: The Digital
Sublime by Vincent Mosco). Now it's the online network - same myth, new
medium.

> OK, Moodle is a great way to get a Department saving 10 of thousands on
> otherwise commercial systems, and it does offer kids an opportunity to learn
> code - don't get me wrong - steps towards open source open content is
> important to push for, but in the end I see Moodle the same as any LMS... a
> replication of the classroom, safely stored on school servers, not
> integrated with real world applications, and given teachers and schools a
> chance to keep being the bricks-in-the-wall that they always were. Even
> though ELGG is integrated with real world apps, ask your average kid on the
> street what ELGG or Moodle is and there's your answer as to why we shouldn't
> bother - especially when we know deep down that what that kid is using, or
> what is already out there is the same if not better than ELGG and Moodle
> anyway!

Is 'replication of the classroom' really what is wrong here? You went
to a classroom I presume, I went to a classroom, in fact I'd bet that
probably 99.9 percent of all the TALO readers went to a classroom and
probably some of them still do. Shouting the end of the LMS is not
really about the LMS. It's about the end of the classroom or the end of
the school; it's the grown up version of "maybe the school will burn
down and we won't have to go", or the philosophical 'end of history' as
each mythical media epoch is prone to throw up (until something
historical, like 9/11 say or tax on the internet, returns with
avengance). Ask your average 'adult learner' what MySpace or Flickr or
Del.icio.us or even Web2.0 is and you're just as likely to get as blank
a stare as asking anyone what Moodle or Elgg is; but ask if they know
what a discussion forum is and that's more to the point. Whether that
discussion forum is on Google or Moodle is hardly the point here it
seems - it's that the 'institution' owns one and a 'corporation' the
other and ... well, it's about here that I kind of get a little
confused.

See, the 'institution' has benevolent goals, doesn't it? It's out to
credentialise all these learners, some of them it's out to socialise,
it's out to make a buck, to fulfill some social good, to fill some
space society has carved out for it. Granted, that space is changing,
that world of knowledge that it used to 'own' it owns no longer and
it's having a bit of a hard time of it all, but in the end it's not a
bad place. But for some reason if it whacks up an LMS or provides a PLE
then this only reproduces all the supposed wrong ways of teaching that
it embodies!? Inside bad, outside good. There is a false distiction
going on and this is what bothers me about the TALO/PLE discussion -
it's lack of criticality, it's mythical reductionionism of the new
media as liberating us from the old instititions which are going to
come crashing down. Sure, some of them are going to fall (and rise like
the phoenix perhaps), but is the school one of them?

The LMS is not rocket science. It may try to embody some pedagogical
principles, but they're at least 'tried and tested' and there's always
room for innovation from empassioned teachers, or in the case of
Moodle, empassioned coders. You do what you want with the tool as much
as the tool may try to do what it wants with you. Now, don't get me
wrong here - i'm also no huge fan of LMS systems and I feel that
disaggregating them is probably preferable to creating monolothic
systems controlled by IT departments or libraries - but I feel that the
discussion around PLEs that has been taking place is fairly
reductionist and actually quite unnecessarily negative on the idea
without that much of a good reason why. I feel that the discussion
would be better framed in questions like, "can a PLE help manage the
virtual for students?" and what relationships exists between the
multiple and complex relations between the online realm and the local
or real? Connections which will need to be critically explored in order
to reaffirm technology's potential to facilitate reflection and
education. (see, Miejas
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/02/in_defense_of_t.html) Can a
PLE help to more focus these relationships than a series of
commercialised third-party tools created by people for whom education
is not particularly their forte or concern?

brent.

[Sean FitzGerald]

brent wrote:

Leigh:

The same arguments existed during the rise of
television, which can be broken down into two waves of firstly
broadcast tv, and then cable during the 70's and 80's. During this
extended "revolution" the medium was promised to realise democracy,
bring world peace and social harmony, and television was going to be
the new tool for transforming the educational system. (see: The Digital
Sublime by Vincent Mosco). Now it's the online network - same myth, new
medium.
  

Couldn't disagree more Brent. TV, whether broadcast or cable, was a continuation of the publishing medium that started with the printing press which took knowledge out of the hands of the few elite and brought knowledge to the masses. This led to the Restoration, the Renaissance, modern democracy (it was feudal system before that), industrialism, and modern Capitalism. While this was all good, the problem was that the message was often controlled by another form of elite - those who controlled the means of media production - i.e. publishing houses and newspapers, and later radio stations and TV stations - such as rich individuals, corporations and the state.

The Internet is making it increasingly possible for anyone to create and distribute knowledge to a global audience. This is the Read/Write web. This is true democratisation. Any one can have a voice. Anyone can have a say. The impact on all of our institutions including the media, entertainment industry, publishing industry, software industry and business in general is profound, and nothing short of a paradigm shift the likes of which we have not seen since the printing press.

If you have any doubt about these changes I suggest you read up about Web 2.0, particularly from the perspective of business, since those people's livelihoods depend on staying abreast of the changes, so their analysis is very much based in reality, not idle theorising. You may also want to take a look at the book of the moment - The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.

The two areas that are slow to notice and adopt these changes are politics and education, both, I suspect because they are huge centralised bureaucracies that aren't at the mercy of market forces, so those in power have no incentive to relinquish control. Even in politics, people are starting to use these tools to disrupt the status quo, looking at how the Internet can bring about a true participatory democracy.

I believe many of us on this list are interested in simply waking the educational sector up to what is happening everywhere else.

Is 'replication of the classroom' really what is wrong here? You went
to a classroom I presume, I went to a classroom, in fact I'd bet that
probably 99.9 percent of all the TALO readers went to a classroom and
probably some of them still do. Shouting the end of the LMS is not
really about the LMS. It's about the end of the classroom or the end of
the school;

Yes, it is. Many believe that the traditional school system, with it's curricula, courses and classrooms, is coming to the end of it's usefulness and something else is emerging to replace them. The LMS is just an extension of the same traditional school model.

Personally I believe that it's about a shift in power dynamics, and I would argue many of the world's problems today are rooted in the way we treat students and condition them into "good" obedient workers and citizens. I have much more to say about this, but maybe later.

it's the grown up version of "maybe the school will burn
down and we won't have to go",

Sure, Leigh and I didn't like school much, and there are the roots of rebelliousness in what we are saying, but this has lead us to both to deep reflection on what is wrong with the school system, why it fails so many people and how we could make it better.

Please don't put it down to nothing but rebelliousness - that is a cheap shot.

Ask your average 'adult learner' what MySpace or Flickr or
Del.icio.us or even Web2.0 is and you're just as likely to get as blank
a stare

As indeed 10 years ago when I talked about this new fangled thing called the World Wide Web people gave me blank stares and often told me it would never catch on!

Whether that
discussion forum is on Google or Moodle is hardly the point here it
seems - it's that the 'institution' owns one and a 'corporation' the
other and ... well, it's about here that I kind of get a little
confused.
  

There's a big difference between discussions that are being held behind closed doors and those on the open web.

See, the 'institution' has benevolent goals, doesn't it?

If by 'the institution' we mean the school system then I don't think we can assume it's quite that simple. Is school about creating freely thinking, critical, independent individuals or good little workers and citizens? Obviously it's about both, and most of the people working within education have the best intentions, but we have to challenge underlying assumptions of the system and ask whether certain endemic structures are ideal or can be improved upon.

But for some reason if it whacks up an LMS or provides a PLE
then this only reproduces all the supposed wrong ways of teaching that
it embodies!? Inside bad, outside good. There is a false distiction
going on and this is what bothers me about the TALO/PLE discussion -
it's lack of criticality, it's mythical reductionionism of the new
media as liberating us from the old instititions which are going to
come crashing down. 

One of the reasons that a more detailed critical analyses isn't going on here on TALO may be that most of these discussions are happening in the blogosphere, and personally I think there are plenty of really smart people on the Internet who are articulating these changes far better than I can.

Sure, some of them are going to fall (and rise like
the phoenix perhaps), but is the school one of them?
  

Maybe. As I said before. These changes are happening everywhere else, so why not in schools?

The LMS is not rocket science. It may try to embody some pedagogical
principles, but they're at least 'tried and tested'

Just because something is 'tried and tested' and achieves certain outcomes for one paradigm doesn't make it any good in the new paradigm. The recording industry is finding out that the 'tried and tested' business model of selling music on bits of plastic in shops isn't working anymore.

 and there's always
room for innovation from empassioned teachers, or in the case of
Moodle, empassioned coders. You do what you want with the tool as much
as the tool may try to do what it wants with you. 

The choice of tool is not neutral. This is called affordance. Choice of tools affects usage and, in the case of education, choice of pedagogical model (and underlying assumptions about the purpose of education and how people are treated and power relationships etc.)

I feel that the
discussion around PLEs that has been taking place is fairly
reductionist and actually quite unnecessarily negative on the idea
without that much of a good reason why.

I'm working on it!

Now. Is that enough critical analysis for you Brent?  :-)

Sean

-- 

Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/

Podcast: http://castingthenetpodcast.blogspot.com/

We live in a moment of history where change is
so speeded up that we begin to see the present
only when it is already disappearing.
-- RD Laing

[Bill Kerr]

On 4/25/06, brent <pumic...@gmail.com> wrote:

 Connections which will need to be critically explored in order
to reaffirm technology's potential to facilitate reflection and
education. (see, Miejas
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/02/in_defense_of_t.html) Can a
PLE help to more focus these relationships than a series of
commercialised third-party tools created by people for whom education
is not particularly their forte or concern?

hi brent,

" ... the gadgets and gizmos we are currently enamored with —edublogs, eduwikis, eduRSS feeds, and such— are nothing more than the tools of hegemonic capitalism"
(from first para of long article from Miejas, cited by Brent)

I disagree with the Miejas article - that new technology is essentially the plaything of the ruling class, that technology will always favour the big guy over the little guy. I haven't read the Miejas article carefully yet but have bookmarked it for a closer look later.

It's not a very intuitive approach since we feel subjectively with blogs, for instance, that we (the little guys) now own our own printing press for the first time in history

I've also thought about from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between humans, technology and progress -  and written about it here:
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-is-technology.html

thanks for sharply raising your opinions - it's great for the discussion
cheers,

- Bill

--
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://beam.to/billkerr
skype: billkerr2006

brent.

[brent]

now we're getting somewhere :-)

[Joyce Smith]

Guys
can't help it, TALO is great, but, if you miss a 'thread' you have no idea of what the previous 'communication' was about!
With Moodle .org forums, e.g. its sorta organised, so you can follow the 'thread' ,and go back through areas of interest, search the forums
etc .
Leigh I luv u , u know that, but, maybe I'm missing something here ? Surely ,what you have 'going' in TALO , is simply an email type 'list'
where one person answers another's email, and, if, they don't 'copy' the message, the next posting has only the one message??
Does not sorta keep the topic going !!
Been reading your thoughts on LMS's etc, quite understand where you as an educator are coming from , because I am still a student, MBA
and the e-learning experience , read big bucks, is pathetic !
Is that the fault of the institution ?
Bottom line , surely, somewhere, one needs to have an accreditation ?  for the knowledge we acquire !!
How do we acquire that accreditation ? From the NET ??
Understand your 'non like' for things 'organised' ,but, surely, 'organised' things are the way that society works !!
Anarchy , is NOT an option ! Lets work together !!
Joyce

--
Joyce Smith

GCert BA (Newcastle)

MYOB Accredited Trainer
MYOB Certified Consultant




On-Site & On-Line Training & Support
CERT IV Trainer & Assessor
E-Moderator (SWPS)

(02) 4945 2806

joyce...@bigpond.com

MY Web-Site

Hunter Central Coast MYOB C.C's

[Leigh Blackall]

Joyce! Welcome back!! Regarding the conversation getting lost because of it not getting threaded.. I think this may be an issue with your choice in eMail software... would you like an invite to gmail? Otherwise, if you go to home page for this list, you'll see that it is threaded somewhat there... but like any forum, some body with less experience with threaded txt conversations manages to break the thread.. :(

As for you question about accreditation... I think training businesses like yours should start investigating ways to recognise prior learning, and give accreditation based on starting with RPL. I'm attempting it right now with a new Graduate Certificate of Tertiary Learning and Teaching being run at my work. As an experiment, I'm going to try and bring my online works to the RPL process and see if I can discover ideas to make that sort of thing better.

Personally I can't see myself going to any one school anymore for my learning. I now subscribe to a faculty of teachers or my own making. I have a news reader chock full of people who I think are the world leaders in eLearning. I'm also picking up other subjects such as sustainable building, video making, and a few others... When I compare the learning I am getting through that news reader to that which I got at a university offering me a Diploma in Education... well, lets just say the Uni was an out of date back wash. If ever I am charged with the responsibility of assessing some one's credentials, I won't take much notice of the paper, accept as a pure formality, but I will look for what they read and reflect on in some way... what they produce as a result... still thinking how exactly.

Brent, thanks for your come back, it is a great for the discussion, though I hope I'm wrong in thinking you are frustrated and disappointed by the quality of the TALO discussions... perhaps its just my way of saying things as you do mostly refer to what I write. Thanks Sean and Bill for jumping in there, it seems Brent is satisfied now.. the only thing I would add is that this issue was touched on briefly in a recorded TALO meet up, where GNUChris asked similar questions as Brent and Joyce, and Sean and I had a go at answering... I got the feeling that Chris had a bit of an ah-ha moment so it might be worth having a listen Brent, and perhaps join us this Thursday evening (9pm our time) for a Teamspeak and we'll see if we can't revisit this issue then. Also, Stephen Downes is back with a vengeance, may be worth listening to his recordings of presentations he makes around the place, especially his thoughts on eLearning 2.0. Stephen will be with us for the TALO Swap Meet down in Dunedin September 18, then on up your way for eFest September 27.

--
--
Would you like to buy my book? http://www.lulu.com/leighblackall
--
Leigh Blackall

+6421736539

[Sean FitzGerald]

Joyce Smith wrote:

Guys can't help it, TALO is great, but, if you miss a 'thread' you have no idea of what the previous 'communication' was about!
With Moodle .org forums, e.g. its sorta organised, so you can follow the 'thread' ,and go back through areas of interest, search the forums etc .
Leigh I luv u , u know that, but, maybe I'm missing something here ? Surely ,what you have 'going' in TALO , is simply an email type 'list'
where one person answers another's email, and, if, they don't 'copy' the message, the next posting has only the one message??
Does not sorta keep the topic going !!

Joyce, I think you have a point.

The problem is that people often don't quote what they are referring and their post often doesn't make any sense as it loses context, and it's a pain having to search back through earlier emails to work out what they are talking about.

The standard netiquette is to quote what you are referring to and trim any excess irrelevant text (so we don't have to search through the email to see if there are any more comments on the original post).

Could I respectfully ask people to please do this.

On the issue of changing subjects that Bill raised in an earlier post - if you want to take the conversation in another direction, the standard practice is to quote the specific point that prompted the new discussion, trim irrelevant text and change the subject line accordingly (as I have done on this message).

For example:

Subject: Original topic

becomes:

Subject: New topic (was: Original topic)

Thanks.

Sean

-- 

Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/
Podcast: http://castingthenetpodcast.blogspot.com/

Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.  
-- Malcolm Forbes (American Publisher)

[Sean FitzGerald]

Sean FitzGerald wrote:

On the issue of changing subjects that Bill raised in an earlier post - if you want to take the conversation in another direction

And if it's completely new topic that may have been inspired in some way by an email, but doesn't require quoting any text, it's best to simply start a new email and new subject altogether.

It's all too easy to just hit "Return" and start a new thread/topic without changing the subject - I know I've been guilty of doing this myself - but this breaks the thread, and we end up having 2 different conversations with the same subject line. That can be very confusing.

Thanks again.

Sean

-- 

Sean FitzGerald
Tel: +61 (0)2 9360 3291
Mob: +61 (0)404 130 342
Skype: seamusy
Email: se...@tig.com.au
Website: http://seanfitz.wikispaces.com/
Blog: http://elgg.net/seanfitz/weblog/
Podcast: http://castingthenetpodcast.blogspot.com/

Peace cannot be achieved through violence,
it can only be attained through understanding.
-- Albert Einstein

[Sean FitzGerald]

I don't know about your email client, but Thunderbird automatically removed the "(was: Re: :: TALO :: Re: Is anybody out there? there? there? PLE-ase)" when I hit Reply. How clever is that!

And also evidence that I'm not just talking through my hat and this is accepted practice.  :-)

Sean

Man is a credulous animal and must believe something.
In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will
be satisfied with bad ones.
-- Bertrand Russell

[Jock]

http://www.despair.com/daretoslack.html
"When birds fly in the right formation, they need only exert half the
effort. Even in nature, teamwork results in collective laziness."

PS: thanks for the "despair" link Alex - great stuff!