Nice html editor 'though not wysiwyg but that is ok. Generates html

elgg.net entered as a url: http://elgg.net

elgg. net entered with link text: Elgg Learning Landscape

Thanks to Misja and Ben for their help in setting this up. See Ben's post Remote posting

This doesn't work on the Leeds Uni installation so I assume it is an added feature subsequent to our install.

I was driving home late last night after a pleasant evening with friends, either retired or quite close to it, and where we had talked about how we got where we are. On the radio I heard one of my favourite poems, the Road not Taken by the Amercian poet Robert Frost. It is one of my favourites because it is about a univeral of the human condition, the ability to make choices, never knowing for sure what is the best one to make and never knowing for sure how life would have been different if another choice had been made. In my case I turned my back on what was a promising career as a racing cyclist and then, later, an even more promising career in financial services.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence.."

All this, of course, is put in perspective by the immortal Yogi Berra, the erstwhile baseball player, who said:

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it".

Who needs poetry! Who needs philosphy!

I am a great fan of Wikipedia. Recently I have taken to putting links to Wikipedia definitions and articles in my on-line teaching materials, wikis, emails, etc. However, Wikipedia is under attack again, and for the usual reasons. It seems that the anonymous posting of entries has now been disabled in response to two high profile scandals.

There are genuine issues of concern here for using Wikipedia in an academic context. I look at the articles I point to pretty carefully and, generally, I am in a good position to make a judgement. But the recommendation that students should use Wikipedia for research is much more problematic. How do others deal with this problem?

Growing pains for Wikipedia CNET News.com - December 5, 2005.
After two scandals in one week, Wikipedia's founder decides to make a change to the anyone-can-contribute encyclopedia.

If Wikipedia is Open Source, Who is Red Hat? is an interesting approach to the problem.

This is a first attempt (probably of many to come) to put some order on what has been swirling about in my head for the last couple of months. This is the result of being involved in a project to produce a pedagogical and technical specification for an institutional VLE, implementing an Elgg project, and lurking in the e-learning blogosphere. I have had the benefit of reading some great blogs, both here and elsewhere.

Thus far: I think the idea of and the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) by students, academics and researchers is the key to what I want to be involved with in the latter years of my career in HE as a teacher.

What is a PLE? How does it incorporate and/or sit on top of or beside a) the institutional VLE, b) the physical and face-to-face elements of the learning environment (traditional campus plus conferences and seminars, e.g.), c) our off-campus lives and selves, d) the whole learning ecology that is life.

How do PLEs contribute to other key educational agendas in a University and beyond? I am particularly interested in issues to do with information literacy, academic writing and life long learning.

How do PLEs contribute to issues connected to personal development, personal development plans (PDP)s, e-portfolios, etc.

Some initial readings containing key ideas relevant to PLEs:

Educational Social Overlay Networks (Terry Anderson; Elgg post). "..Educational social software can be used effectively to create a type of overlay network to enhance the more formal institutional network consisting of student support , library, tuition, registration and other institutionalized services..".

Educational Social Overlay Networks (Terry Anderson) "Scott Leslie nicely raises a discussion of the relationship between educational social software tools and the current generation of Learning Management Systems (LMS). The challenge is to recognize which components of the learner's life should be situated in their individual web space and those that should be running in the space of the formal educational institution".

When learning goes underground (George Siemens). "Administrators, learning designers, and teachers are facing a new kind of learner - someone who has control over the learning tools and processes. When educators fail to provide for the needs of learners (i.e. design learning in an LMS only), learners are able to "go underground" to have their learning needs met".

The PLE debate begins (Scott Wilson). "Nice to see some discussion around the PLE concept. Leigh Blackall takes the most critical position, and Dave Cormier examines Leigh's position. Meanwhile, Stephen Downes notices the commotion...".

PLE Reference Model presentation as a PPT file (926k) from CETIS Conference (Colin Milligan).

Why provide a VLE? (Ben Werdmuller). "Christopher D. Sessums pointed me to this post by Graham Attwell about VLEs. Graham suggests that: 'We assume students will provide their own word processors - be they proprietary or open source. Why then do we persist in providing e-learning systems. Not because of generosity I would suggest but because institutions are desperate to maintain control. I think this is possibly true for unconnected learning environments'"

Academic Writing & Citations (Joan Vinall-Cox) "..Academic writing has changed radically since I was an undergrad many years ago. When I wrote my Ph.D. thesis a year and a half ago, I made rich use of the capabilities of word-processing".

Taking back the university (Christopher D. Sessums). "The more I study the nature of technology, teaching, and learning, the more I come to realize that the structure and design of most universities prevents deep, meaningful learning from happening".

Personal Learning Environments are getting closer (Graham Attwell). "Occasionally a project does grab my attention. The one which I am excited about at the moment is the Personal Learning Environments project".

Google Blog Search: Personal Learning Environments

A colleague at work drew my attention to this article, Web 2.0, published in November this year by Paul Graham. I have read a lot about Web 2.0 in recent months and have always been rather confused about what it is. I came to the conclusion it is something about working collaboratively on the Web using web-based 'social software'. However, I think I am a bit clearer on this now thanks to this article. There is a great deal in it that I found interesting but a couple of things in particular caught my attention.

Paul Graham focuses on two main aspects of Web 2.0 (a name he hates) - the development of web based applications and the notion that it signifies a welcome and belated development towards what he considers to be the intrinsic nature of the web; its interactive, 'community' and democratic potential. Both these aspects of the web are linked in his comments on Wikipedia, for example. He says: "Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation". What immediately struck me here was his use of the word 'conversation'. It is because Wikipedia is subject to a community of users and is criticised and developed through communication between interested and engaged users that it works as well as it does. The role of the community and their conversation is central.

This links to another issue alluded to by the article, the issue of quality, given the masses of junk on the web. The suggestion is that the 'democratic' nature of the web makes the community of users the best evaluator of web content. I first came across this idea while reading George Siemens' essays, blog posts and his Elgg podcast on his theory of 'connectivism'. This is based on the notion that an interactive community of practitioners in a particular sphere, say e-learning, collectively read, evaluate, use and refer to and disseminate what they find to be useful and of value on the web. These resources and reflections upon them are integrated into the community's conversation, ideas are tested, criticised and developed and reputations for being a reliable source and interesting commentator/contributor are built. George Siemens' offered this as one of the reasons he is not worried about his or other writings he draws upon not having been passed through the process of a peer reviewed journal. He argues that the 'community' review exposes the whole review process to readers and is often as useful, or more so, a resource as is the article in question. It exposes the 'knowledge making process' and not just some anonymously authorised version of the content, which some months later, if ever, gets a published comment and then even later perhaps a reply from the original author.

The other section of the article I found suggestive is the account of why Excite, an early product of the original dot.com boom, failed. According to Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite, the problem was largely the use of inappropriate business models. "Excite really never got the business model right at all. We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium [...] which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out." This again reminded me very much of something else George Siemens has claimed, that a great deal of the e-learning practice and 'instructional design' that has attempted to use the new web technologies have largely failed because they have been based upon older pedagogies and models for teaching and learning. The problem has been that we have failed to recognise and develop the different pedagogies and models of learning that are naturally facilitated by new forms of collaborative working and the 'social' aspects of social software.

My source for George's ideas is his Elgg podcast. At the time I made some Notes on George Siemens' Elggradio podcast that cover in more detail the points above.

This is to try out embedding podcasts into posts.

Not really. Season's greetings and have a great New Year to all friends; past, present and yet to come (regardless of religion).

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23

Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5

(With thanks to Aisha Siddiqah)