Critical Literacies and Native Collaboration

The epiphany is that what I have been thinking around native collaboration and what Stephen and participants of the Critical Literacies open course (which I regret not being actively part of) have been discussing have a great deal of resonance. Like in CCK08, I was approaching the topic more from the tools and implementation perspective while the [...]

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Of teachers and teaching

I came across John Merrow’s post on Proof that Teachers Matter in which he talks about an LA Times story in which “ Three reporters documented the effects that teachers have on their students’ test results.”  The current shameful controversy and its continuing aftermath around the proclamation of a semester system in Delhi University brings a [...]

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Look who is talking

I just read Will Richardson’s thought-provoking post Who’s Asking. In particular, this paragraph stands out / echoes my thoughts: So here’s the deal with the change that many of us in this conversation are clamoring for in schools: we’re about the only ones talking it. The townsfolk down at the corner store aren’t demanding “21st [...]

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On tradition

I have now been going to school events – formal and informal – for about 5 years in my capacity as a parent. My 5 year old and my 10 year old are being programmed to show respect, listen attentively and obey authority by the school system. The way of doing this is to make doing yoga [...]

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The Ontologies of Collaboration

I had written earlier about collaboration as native collaboration - the basic thesis being that we should perhaps be able to bring a new level of structured collaboration for learning that can assess learning defined as connectedness of an individual. I had looked at tools like IMINDI and sites like MindQuarry. The five aspects of native collaboration [...]

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Learners as Educators

Sliced PLEs – that is the term I had thought of to describe the subject of this post. I wrote: Let us say I managed to slice through everything in my PLE and gathered relevant information (posts, entries, discussions etc) around a specific learning area. Then, suppose I had the tools to order and sequence [...]

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Attaching more than the network to open courses

Alan Levine summed it up nicely: And frankly, the open courses, marched to the beat of a fixed time length syllabus, might be seen as an incremental step from (I guess they would be called) closed courses? Non open courses? Are there other models than attaching the open network to a fixed course? We have [...]

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Innovative Learning Formats

I am looking at the history of web based training. Found an interesting timeline here and here. Google’s timeline search throws up some more interesting links. In particular, I liked reading this 1998 thesis by Mattias Moser. I am sure I could be pointed to more (and it would be great if you could point me to more). [...]

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Open Courses

This is in addition to the discussion on the Open Courses Educause article by George and Dave. Interestingly, being one of the 18 students who sought accreditation, I sought it because I believed that I needed to get personal attention and direct mentoring from an expert. The concepts I networked with were (and are) serious [...]

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Can eLearning really scale

I know this must be on the face of it a rather impertinent question. But I am not talking just the about the “e” in eLearning (of course bits and bytes can float to almost anywhere now), but I am talking of eLearning as a whole concept. So what am I saying? Let me focus on [...]

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Learning and Architecture

I was prompted by Howard to think more about the intersection of Learning and Architecture. Howard states: I’ve been thinking about how to create educationally relevant physical and social spaces for networked everyday learning. The similarity is in the importance of physical space and tacit learning. And poses the question: So . . . how [...]

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Connective Simulations

Trust Stephen to come out with another super presentation. The presentation titled The Representative Student seeks to explore two challenges related to the modeling – the role of simulations or models in both delivering and learning about learning; and the relationships between adaptive courseware and social learning environments. This comes close on the heels of the [...]

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