Apart from multitasking through the two Elluminate sessions this week and “curating” the course materials in my Week 4 Pearltree, I’ve hardly participated in #PLENK2010 this week. It’s not because of the week four effect discussed in Dave Comier’s blog posting Cluster and Focus -> Surviving week 4 of a MOOC, neither is it the “painful and confusing” nature of this week’s topic PLE/PLN and learning theories. Rather its the imposition of real life....
This week’s PLENK2010 topic is an exploration of what Steve Wheeler has called Web 3.0, Stephen Downes has christened Web X, George Siemens calls xWeb and Rita Kop calls the eXtended Web. I prefer Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s name of the Data Web introduced in this TED talk and discussed here (Pivot My Data) back in March. Out of interest, I present the Wordles of, clockwise from top left, Berners-Lee’s TED talk, Siemens’ xWeb, Kop’s eXtended web and Wheeler’s Web 3....
At the end of the Beatles’ seminal Sergeant Pepper album is the track “A Day in the Life.” Those who’ve heard it will know that right at the end of the track, and therefore the album, is the climax in which an orchestra works itself up into a frenzy of noise before a single piano chord brings the whole thing to an end. PLENK2010 has been like being in that orchestra this week....
Earlier today, over in PLENK2010, Eduardo Peirano started a discussion Personal Learning and the […] Seven Principles of Good Practice in which he linked to a paper by Chickering and Gamson (1987) with the suggestion that the seven principles might be used to evaluate Personal Learning and the whole MOOC experiment. What are the principles? Good practice in undergraduate education: 1. encourages contact between students and faculty, 2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students, 3....
I’ve just finished reading Martin Weller’s paper The Decentralition Dillema in Education IT (one of the PLENK2010 week 2 readings) and I thought I’d use audioBoo.fm to say a few words about what we have at Swansea. Here’s the recording: http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf Martin will be a guest presenter at the Wednesday Elluminate session later today and it will be interesting to see what he has to say and how the course facilitators and course members respond....