News reached me today of an interesting new model of learning design from the Applied Pedagogic Research Institute of Learning – an international consortium of researchers and practitioners from Finland, Oman, Okayama and Luxembourg – which promises to ‘promote individual attainment through authentic learning practice via user-driven acquisition of learning
At the OU Teaching and Learning Conference I was fascinated by a talk on SocialLearn by Simon Buckingham Shum. SocialLearn is the Open University’s social learning solution that is currently being developed. It aims to be a social learning space which can integrate existing tools in the OU and the
Donald Schön (1983) suggested that the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning was one of the defining characteristics of professional practice. He commented on the “Technical Rationality” type of model of professional training — which involves “charging students up” with knowledge
Can you help me compile the ultimate list of resources for using blogs in learning and teaching? A while ago I did a bit of a bibliography on the use of wikis in learning and teaching [Blog post August 2007]. Together with some practical action research with the use of
What is it? Delicious (http://delicious.com) or del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service that allows users to save their favourite websites as bookmarks and share them with other people. What is Social Bookmarking? Bookmarking is a way of storing and sharing websites that you found useful or interesting. In the past,
A study at the University of Plymouth once looked at graduate students’ use of Web 2.0 technologies when they were studying in their daily working environment. The study found that at least 50% of the applications students had open at any one time were actually leisure applications. The kind of
In my previous posts about the roles and tasks within an online community or community-based social network, I discussed the roles of the Community Editor and Community Facilitator. Both these roles, but particularly that of the Community Facilitator, are really a combination of roles, but it helps to categorise the
The core principle of The Cohesion Model for Sustainable Online Communities and Social Networks (as described in my previous post on 13th November) is that there are effectively three levels within a community – the Public, the Community or Collaborative, and the Private or Individual level. There is a role associated
The Cohesion Model for Sustainable Online Communities and Social Networks was developed by myself, Helen Whitehead, and Liz Cable over three years, and based on rather more than 15 years of experience in online communities and social networks before that. It’s also informed by the literature on learning communities, communities
Research out today suggests that 40% of Twitter messages, or tweets, are “pointless babble”. US Researchers Pear Analytics sampled the Twitter stream (mostly of Americans) and categorized the tweets as news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value. They concluded that only 8.7% were of real value.