As part of the first week’s assignment we’ve been asked to set up our own webhost and domain. I’ve registered a new domain cpjobling.me with Godaddy.com and a signed up for the minimum hosting package from cast iron coding (CIC). I’m waiting for my confirmations to come through, then I’ll be setting up my name servers using the instructions provided here and WordPress blog using the instructions given here. Everything went fine and now I have a new Word Press blog which may one-day replace this one: blog.

I’ve just joined the Evaluation of Learners’ Experiences of e-learning Special Interest Group (ELESIG) which is based around a Ning site (elesig.ning.com). After Chris Hall and David Williams launched a Gwella group, I’ve noticed an increase in activity and the community that is developing looks to be quite exciting. Was I wrong to reject Ning when they removed free access? Should we have stuck with Ning for SALT and the Learning Lab?

2011 apparently marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. To mark the occasion, the BBC made a bit of a splash last week with a sequence of three forty-five minute documentaries fronted by James Naughtie on the commissioning, translation and legacy of the bible. These were followed by 7 hours of readings from the King James Bible made by the great and the good of the acting professions and introduced by well-known luminaries of literature and history.

Just read Stephen Downes’ article on the Huffington Post that announces that registration for Connectivsm and Connective Knowledge 2011 (cck11) — starting 17th January — is open. I definitely won’t have the personal resource to do much there, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless.

Jim Groom is getting ready to launch another massive open online course (MOOC). Tony Hirst, who drew my attention to Jim’s course Digital Storytelling (ds106.us) with this post: Massive Open Online Courses all you need to know, has curated a few videos from PLENK2010 facilitator Dave Cormier on the philosophy of a MOOC. I’ve signed up for Digital Storytelling, but I expect my role to be more as a lurker than turned out to be the case on PLENK.

Next year I’ve got a fairly busy schedule. Here are some things that I might be blogging about. I record them here as an aide memoir: Large group assessment The “Flip” Socratic questioning Peer Instruction, Assessment and Support LiveScribe Echo Social networks Student employability and entrepreneurship. Technically, I expect to be playing with Drupal, WordPress, BuddyPress, Moodle and Elgg and maybe, if there’s time, Ruby on Rails 3. I might submit something (probably a poster) to ALT-C 2011.

In the media, as the shortest day approaches and with it the end of the old year, it’s traditional to look back. Here is the first of my retrospectives on 2010. My tool of the year is Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com), which I discovered during PLENK2010. I’ve used this as both a curation tool (see my Plenk2010 collection) and as an exploratory learning object builder but it also has a social network discovery and connection building capability and recently added a group/team curation feature.

There’s an interesting debate forming around this post from George Siemens (My Personal Learning Network is the most awesomest thing ever!!) and a response from Jenny Mackness (In defence of lurking). George’s stance is that you can’t really learn in a community unless you are contributing something, Jenny’s that it’s OK to observe and not contribute. There are lot’s of other interesting points of view expressed in the comments. To me, I feel I got more out of PLENK2010 by being an active contributor, although in the end I wasn’t sure if I’d learned that much.

Stump Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Winter has come early this year. No snow yet in Swansea, but cold enough for frost. For more see Frost on Flickr, and listen to Dylan reading his poem A Winter’s Tail (curated by Poetictouch.com), which seems quite appropriate.

Via OLdaily, November 2010. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hj1COx

Alan Cann today announced the availability of the alpha release of the new distributed social network Diaspora. It’s seems to be available without the need for invitations and you can get an account by registering at http://diasp.org. Once registered, you’ll have a handle: mine is cpjobling@diasp.org. One unique selling point (USP) is that Diaspora has ways of organizing your various networks around aspects of your social networks. In my case, as well as the default Work and Family aspects, I’ve created an aspect for PLENK2010 and e-Learning folks.

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.