electro-textual

Well this is extraordinary. Nearly two thousand people involved in a massive online course on Connectivism; a course that will go from now until November-ish, and takes place on thousands of different sites around the world. Have to join in, don’t i!

Stephen and George are among my favourite writers, and yes, i’ve missed a couple of courses i wanted to attend this year (eg Leigh on facilitating).. so it’s time to dive in and experience.

Got no idea what connectivism is really .. well it’s somewhere in there with Social Constructivism and Post-Structuralist, De-Constructionism .. Let me see if i can say:

Connectivism is all about the networks. Internal neural networks, and external social networks.

Apparently, we make sense of the world through our frameworks and structures, and knowledge is negotiated through socialising in our distributed networks. Connection creates meaning, the mind is a patterning agent, and all this takes place within increasingly complex spaces involving more and more technology.

(Mind map above links to full version.)

i may have heard someone say that knowledge resides in the network. Provided your network is working properly that is .. how many organisations suffer when key personnel depart?

It’s only day one, and already the goog has over 6000 links to CCK08+Connectivism.
Some of the many course links:

• wiki (week one),
• blog for regular updates,
• pageflakes (collecting all resources),
• getting started presentation,
• twitter for micro updates,
• Stephen’s Daily,
• people introduce themselves in moodle,
• Stephen’s intro on the Ustream TV site.

i wonder how long before i’m completely overwhelmed  ;-]

Yep, already.

image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr:
Thanks very much: fdecomite

Mashups have been the most flavoursome technological approach for the last couple of years, in and out of the e-learning world. i have relished the opportunity to splash music, video, slides and photostories all over the web – just by copy-and-pasting some “embed code”.

Will wordpress allow me to mash in my voice-based thoughts? (no, have to use odeo instead)

powered by ODEO

According to wikipedia, there are four main kinds of mashup: digital, musical, video and “web application hybrid”. Aha, that’s why i was getting so confused about the term.

Then there’s my sweet potato and beetroot mashup too. MMM.

For example this video from YouTube, which i found via a site called “TimeTube“. Timetube is a genuine mashup site, because it uses the youtube “API” to search and publish in its own way. i could then republish the video here (it’s a kind of mashup in itself – a South Park style homage to the simpsons).

Jo Kay’s just given a good overview of the whole mashup scene, from musical mashups to text-and-video in e-learning mashups. Great session, full of information. Relevant links include:

• Jo’s notes in her wikispace, from the session
• Coach Carole’s Live Blogging of the event, in the innovate + integrate space
• The Framework events page, where you’ll find the recording at some stage
• Jo’s colleague from Montana showed us this collaborative project between students in Au/Us, using for example Voicethread
• A huge collection of web app mashups using the YouTube API (huge!)
• Brian Lamb wrote an article last year in Educause about the whole mashup thing, which is worth a read, plus
• my own notes about RSS which is one ingredient of the mashing process.

.. and here, if i can do the mash properly, are the slides from the show:

| View | Upload your own

and to finish .. this classic video mash of Star Trek meets Monty Python. It could be funny, if you’re in the mood.

Over at Preston Reservoir ACE, we’re slowly setting up an intranet. Anyone on the site can set up their own “blog” (diary, or journal). This could be useful for reflective learning in the classroom: teachers could encourage students to post thoughts on their own learning progress.

There’s so much going on in the world of learning- with- technology, that it would be great to involve the wonderful teachers at PRACE even more. I’m hoping this place will help us share our knowledge more effectively.

We’re using moodle, the popular, open source “learning management system” software.
But do we want our learning “managed”?
.. and how flexible is this system really?

By the way, the image top right is one of my favourites, and is free to use, as long as i tell you where i got it. Eisenrah, at flickr.com, published this image with a “Creative Commons licence” (search from that link).

michael

Currently enjoying Mark Warschauer’s “Electronic Literacies”: in chapter one he makes the strong point that the Gutenberg era took hold only through the massive social and economic changes of the industrial revolution. The printing press technology had been ready for some time.
Mark reckons that the current acceleration of technological change in the fields of literacy and communication is deeply connected with the current industrial revolution, “based on the harnessing of information, knowledge and networks”. He adds that this current information-based revolution is not only industrial, but also social and economic.

So, according to Warschauer, it’s not so much the technologies that change the way we work and learn, rather it’s the huge social changes going on around us that drive the need for new thinking-interacting-learning tools.

Seems to me, that social networks appear to be taking up the new literacy technologies faster than “industry”. For example, Murdoch playing catch-up with the people’s “myspace”. Or the original Napster, targeted as a villain by the music companies, before being co-opted into the new paradigm it helped to create.