Well, that’s the end of an stretch of engaged learning and a great introduction to educational weblogging. Thanks to the classmates who have buoyed my spirits with comments here and friendly tweets.
I have moved most of the posts below to a new site, http://pennyjw.wordpress.com, and will continue blogging there – I’m not sure whether that will be my main home, or if I should construct the main parts of my personal learning environment at http://me.edu.au/p/pennyjw
In an individual reflection on the learning community design our group created on the Learn2 wiki, I examine the personal pluses and time constraint minuses of this collaborative learning experience.
(photo at right: ‘Mirror egg’, uploaded on Flickr under Creative Commons by LollyKnit.)
E-learning doesn’t happen in just one place, and part of the work this semester has been to try and choose ways to round up current information and be able to check it over as we run it through the drafting race looking for viable, fertile ideas and knowledge culls. Twitter has been good for that, and seems to have become increasingly an awareness service, not a directed communication method (‘Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information’ Mashable, 2 June 2009).
Retaggr is an example of another way to corrall the mob of social networking sites. My Retaggr business card highlights the tools where I have profiles:
Steve Bailey’s keynote speech at the Records Management Society conference in Edinburgh in April 2008 (‘From YouTube to YouManage: the need to democratise the management of records‘) is worthy of further study, particularly remembering the de facto folksonomies that flourished during the last emergency of note and then needed to be unravelled and their targets re-catalogued.
One quote can stand for the whole, for now:
Well, today, and with a total disregard for my personal modesty, I give you Bailey’s Law, which states: As the volume and diversity of the electronic information created increases; so the effectiveness of records management as we know it to cope with this changedecreasesby equal measure.
It doesn’t look like one, but records management is a very hot topic.
I do not like writing on the group wiki that we are using for our current design project.
Perhaps the time pressure for this project is a bit strong, but when I wonder why I dislike this part of our project so much, it throws up many other questions I would like to explore.
What are wikis for?
I can understand the need to use wikis when the topic that is to be developed / catalogued / documented is too large for a small authorial team – like an encyclopedia. (Luckily Wikipedia could use 300 years’ worth of print encyclopedias as a model for a structure and a format.) Or at least too large for one or two people to develop rapidly.
And perhaps wikis have a place in binding many disparate contributions loosely together – as for example in collecting multiple class assignments into a single handy location.
It stands to reason that groups will develop some negotiation skills and perhaps learn more about a topic when planning the wiki – what are the salient divisions to the topic? Who should write what? But collaborative writing – I just don’t understand it.
Death of the author
An article by Mark Warschauer and Douglas Grimes (‘Audience, authorship and artifact: the emergent semiotics of Web 2.0′, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, no. 27, pp. 1-23) provides some explanation: Read the rest of this entry »
Happy to learn that my brain is not inexorably wearing out, but rather has a capacity of reshaping itself and is indeed characterised by its vigorous plasticity (see, for example, Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, or,
All in the Mind, The Power of Plasticity, 13 September 2008 (Norman Doidge and Jeffrey Schwartz)
If, however, I still need some assistance I will gratefully turn to Wolfram|Alpha, the newly available computational knowledge engine which will answer the vague queries of my ageing mind with crisp and precise information. Read the rest of this entry »
Should we include a chat feature in an online community? Currently we are designing a community which might be presented as a Ning, and I notice that not all Nings enable chat.
(photo at right: ‘Ludo’, uploaded on Flickr under Creative Commons by Bindaas Madhavi.)
Niesten and Sussex (2006, p. 73), talking about internet chat (IRC in generic terms), describe chat as covering a range of humour from vulgar burlesque to high intellectual wit, and do not feel that its ludicity (that is, playfulness) is entirely a force for good. Read the rest of this entry »
Stephen Downes convinced me to do personal knowledge publishing, but I am just clarifying in my own mind what this actually looks like, and what format(s) I would use.
The chaordic path is a term from the Art of Hosting framework, which is an approach to community engagement. If you want to create something new, you have to step into the space between chaos and order - the chaordic path is a controlled way along chaotic stepping stones
A dark blog is either
1. a blog behind the corporate firewall, unavailable to the public, but speeding up internal communications (What are dark blogs?)
or
2. a blog for some kind of corporate crisis, like a PR disaster, setting ready to activate (Shel Holtz, A Shel of my Former Self, 18/09/2008)
Entries (RSS)