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....
… and that’s a problem because it makes RSS feed aggregation harder than it should be. Once upon a time, Tim Berners-Lee and a few of his close friends, invented the concept of a URL1, and in the early days of the web, the ‘U’ in URL could be taken to stand for Unique (although it’s always stood for Uniform). Thus, if you typed a URL into a browser address field, it would take you to one, and only one, destination....
The first week of #PLENK2010 is nearly over. Just one Elluminate discussion to go (16.00 Zulu, 17.00 BST). This is my first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) (it’s actually my first experience of any form of formal learning for quite some time) but despite all the dire warnings about information overload issued at the start, I actually think I’ve settled in quite nicely. I have read all the readings (and made notes!...