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.

At PLENK2010 participant Heli Nurmi’s request (see Test Your Blog Please), I submitted the URL of this blog to http://www.typealyzer.com/ to have it subjected to a Myers-Briggs personality test. It turns out that these scribblings reveal me to be an INTP type (The Thinker) The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

Week 7 in PLENK2010 Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Week 7 of PLENK2010 is all about the tools. I subject about which I believe I actually have some expertise. Though the concept of the personal learning environment has been around for the last five years, there has not been a comprehensive summation of what has been developed in the field. We would like to build that summation this week.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. – Inigo Montoya, the (film of) The Princess Bride. Novel and screenplay by William Goldman. This week, I was in Gegynog at the final meeting of the Gwella participants. While there, a few people mentioned the phrase digital literacy. A variation of the phrase cropped up in the introduction to the readings for Week 6 of #PLENK2010 (see the Wordle above).

On Sunday, I finally found the time to listen to the recording of guest Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, from Wednesday’s #PLENK2010 live Elluminate session. In this session, Will gave a short presentation Using PLE’s Successfully and a couple of things came up. First was a summary of the recommendations on 21st Century* *Literacies from the US National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) [1]:

The title of this occasional series is a bit of a joke as it’s been several weeks since my last Podcast of the Week post. Nonetheless, it’s worth breaking my silence this week because this month‘s podcast of the week has local and professional interest. I’m a committee member of the Wales South West Network of the Institution of Engineering Technology (IET). Serving in the Young Professionals Network is ‘young’ Rhys Phillips who broadcasts a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) podcast called Pythagoras’ Trousers on Sunday mornings on Radio Cardiff (7.

The college newsagent had sold out of The Guardian, so I bought a copy of the latest Times Higher. There were two main features of interest. The first, mostly bad news for the UK academy, were the reports of the likely impact of the Browne review that was published this week “Lord of the market: let competition and choice drive quality.” The future looks dark indeed, with strong hints (see Leader: A gamble on the Market) of a 70% reduction in teaching budgets and the decimation of funding for non Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.

Today’s live #PLENK2010 session was ostensibly about assessment in a Personal Learning Environment but it seemed to be more about how PLENK2010 (the research project) could assess whether the participants (us) could assess their own learning or indeed whether or not it was possible to assess what learning actually happens or could happen in a Massive Open Online Course. In other words, we PLENKers are lab rats running the maze of a completely unstructured learning experience so that the people in white coats can observe us and form theories about how lab rats learn so that they might build the personal learning environment of the future.

Losing Contact! The faciltators said we couldn’t possibly read everything, but I feel like I’ve not read anything from Weeks 4 and 5. As you can see there’s a huge amount of discussion going on in the Week 4 forum and it’s already building up in Week 5 which has just started. And that’s not even counting the twitter feed and The Daily. I feel like a marathon runner who went too fast for the first 3rd and is not going to make the 13 mile marker.