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Those of you who are regular readers will know that I spent 10 weeks from September to November immersed (almost literally) in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010). As already reported, one of the highlights for me was the guest appearance of Maria Andersen and her intriguing proposal for developing SOCRAIT, a Socratic questioning layer on the internet consisting of a Learn This button, a social gaming-like motivation and reward system, and channeled expertise designed to provide a personalized learning for the masses....

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I spent 10 weeks from September to November immersed (almost literally) in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010). As already reported, one of the highlights for me was the guest appearance of Maria Andersen and her intriguing proposal for developing SOCRAIT, a Socratic questioning layer on the internet consisting of a Learn This button, a social gaming-like motivation and reward system, and channeled expertise designed to provide a personalized learning for the masses....

This week I am attending the JISC-sponsored online conference Innovating eLearning 2010. Any posts I make here or in the Community Blog are likely to be on my reflections from this conference. The conference is for paying delegates only, but some materials are out in the public Internet, and I’ll refer to them where appropriate. The twitter back-channel is using the hash-tag #jiscel10.

Short answer … not much. At least that’s how it appears to me at the moment. I do know that I’m all PLENKED out, somewhat depressed and not looking forward to immersing myself in #jiscel10. Perhaps it’s a symptom of SAD, or maybe I’m just in mourning.

Socrates Week 7 in PLENK2010 was concerned with PLE/N tools (What Exists, What is Being Built?): Many of the tools that fit under the PLE/N umbrella have been appropriated by educators from other fields. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does reflect a sense that educators are not building tools for themselves. The software that we use in this course is a bit of an exception. We [the facilitators] rely on various open source tools (Moodle, WordPress), proprietary tools (Elluminate), and tools that have been developed with feedback from facilitators and experiences in other open courses (i....