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.

… 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!

At Tony Hirst’s suggestion (see comments to previous post), I followed Alan Levine’s instructions and created a custom google search engine derived from Stephen Downes ‘feed of feeds’ OPML file. It took a couple of attempts as it’s not clear on the Google Custom Search Engine creation page just what you have to do, and the order you have to do it, but with Alan’s post and a bit of perseverance I worked it out.

I have started putting together a personal learning environment for the Massively Open Online Course PLENK2010. Taking my inspiration from mashup-meister Tony Hirst, I have created an Aggregator using Yahoo! Pipes. This takes the OPML file (connect.downes.ca/feeds.xml) from the PLENK2010 Participants Feeds page, feeds it through a filter to extract posts with #PLENK2010 in the body or title, and produces a simple feed reader. The output of this can be obtained in various formats including iGoogle feed reader gadget, Google Reader, netvibes widget, JSON and RSS.

Today a Massively open Online Course (MOOC) on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge (PLENK2010) is starting. The course is being facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, our own Rita Kop and Dave Cormier and is being used in various was to research PLEs and their effectiveness. Personally, I am hoping to learn more about Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks (aren’t they the same thing?); how I might exploit them in my own personal learning; and how I might adopt the ideas in my teaching.

Philip Larkin was the Librarian at the University of Hull and while I was a student there, I think I actually saw him once, striding imperiously through the Brynmor Jones Library. He was also a famous poet who died in 1985 and the City of Hull is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his death with a number of special events. One of the more bizarre events is Larkin with Toads, the temporary invasion of 40 giant fibre-glass toads, a public art installation which celebrates Larkin’s poems of working life ‘Toads’ and ‘Toads Revisited’ (See Wikipedia article).

Personal success but failure for mobile technology! 8.27 (BST 7.27 GMT): On the Bus at Bracelet Bay, Mumbles. First trip report filed with Audioboo.fm: http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf #### Stage One: Rhossilli to Port Eynon, 7 Miles 09.22: Rhossilli, at the start of the walk, I filed my second report filed on AudioBoo.fm. There was no reception for quite a while! http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf The first stage of the walk, the coastal path between Rhossilli and Port Eynon is a distance of seven miles.