I have just taken delivery of a book called 'In Command - Kids and Teens Build and manage their own information spaces - and ... learn to manage themselves in those spaces' by Robin T Williams and David V Loertscher. The title is almost longer than the book itself which is rather thin at 100 pages and badly printed with occasional lines on every page which are unaccountably paler than the rest as well as a few typos. However this is the first publication I am aware of which promotes the idea of students creating their own personal learning spaces online and gives practical advice both to the students themselves and their teachers on how to do this.
There is an accompanying blog at http://incommand.wordpress.com and a wiki at http://incommand.pbwiki.com/ but both are rather empty as yet. This publication is timely as the VITAE project is in the process of developing the train the trainers course which we aim to pilot within the next year or so. One major consideration of the course is the extent to which you introduce participants to individual Web 2.0 tools and make them aware of the educational potential of each or whether it would be better to go the whole hog and talk about students developing their own personal learning environments from the start. The 'In Command' advice rests on the creation of these personal learning environments and identifies three types of spaces, the personal work space, group work space for collaborative projects and 'outer space' which is the wider Internet.
Keywords: euvitae, In Command, personal learning environments, VITAE
