Thanks to Stephen Downes, yet again, for pointing out Terry Anderson’s excellent piece on Open, distance, e-learning and other name confusion in his always useful Virtual Canuk blog. As Terry noted there has been a lot written on the subject. I was reminded of two pieces of work.

Robin Mason and Frank Rennie recently produced an elearning lexicon, E-Learning, the key concepts. I have a quibble with their conflation of e- and distance learning, but it is a very useful work which as much as resolving, illustrates the problems of trying to resolve definitions in a politicised field: micro institutional as well as in respect of national and international educational policies (q.v. one laptop per child project).

I was also reminded of work I contributed to an article for the UK Higher Education Academy on the Undergraduate experience of blended learning (citation below, link to pdf) by colleagues at Brookes.

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This is the transcript of a roundtable session that joined LaGuardia College faculty with internationally recognized ePortfolio leaders, Helen Barrett and Darren Cambridge to discuss the issues facing the ePortfolio movement.

An interesting question is raised by a Design Pattern problem, Others First, identified by Yishay Mor in the Pattern Language Network wiki:

Parents who create an online identity for themselves that includes any images of and text about their children inevitably create an online identity for those children. The children have no control over how they are presented or who they are presented to.

I include images of my child in online repositories, some open some private. So this led me to ask whether the problem identified, for it is a problem, was expressed to address a narrow and particular issue or a broad and general issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Another very useful Berkman talk on Immersive Interfaces by Chris Dede, Timothy E Wirth professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Dede develops a typology of immersive interfaces and illustrates their application in US middle schools. Even more usefully he presents a simple analytical framework for discussing immersive environments for learning: is it an environment or is it an interface? And, as frosting on the cake he gives sound cultural and pedagogical arguments for the use of immersive technologies in education.

Milestones and all that: JISC programme managers, today, agreed the Institutional Innovation Programme, Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Project plan. Hurrah!

Thanks and a(nother) tippo to A J Cann for the link (via his soti bookmarks on delicious) to D’arcy Norman’s epigenetics and the institution. This hit me as an approach to conceptualising the relationship between individuals and institutions for a paper I am puzzling over writing, about the utility of participatory media (Web2.0/the social internet) to the support, synthesis and benefits realisation of educational R&D programmes.

This post is one small link in a chain started for me by A J Cann in a post on his Emerge blog, The P word, fed from Science of the Invisible that linked to Michael Wesch’s post, Participatory Media Literacy: why it matters, referring to “… Howard Rheingold’s great little article, Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies,” I am reminded of my colleagues at Brookes, who regularly observe that students show a highly uncritical approach to the media with which they saturate their world (and by which it is saturated). Undergraduate use of the Web for learning was studied in a large multi-method research project aimed to evaluate learner experience of e-learning at Oxford Brookes University, Exploring patterns of student learning technology use, reported at Networked Learning 2008.

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Since my exchange with A J Cann, about feeding selected posts to the Emerge site, I have started this blog. In it, I have created a number of categories for my posts, such as “Community IT Centre”, and “R&D Projects” and “Emerge”. I wanted to be able to select only those posts that were tagged “Emerge” and feed them to my Emerge Blog. But it wasn’t obvious how. The WPMU dashboard doesn’t put an rss logo next to the category name. It took a little hunting, but I found the answer in the WordPress Codex, “WordPress feeds”. It looks like this:
 http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/category…

Because WordPress multi user (WPMU) is more tightly controlled, themes cannot readily be edited by users. This means I cannot, yet, stick an rss button next to my category list in the right sidebar. But for now I should be able to feed the Elgg from here with only Emerge-relevant posts. Like this.

I read Josie Fraser’s, Notes towards digital literacy, and Terry Wassal’s recent comment on it with interest. This post has stimulated a lot of discussion in the comments and on other blogs. When thinking about the Brookes elearning strategy, I recently took an opposite, narrow view. I do not want to argue against the broad view Josie takes: basically, she’s right, but for the purposes of developing a curriculum place for digtial literacy, I thought it might be helpful to think about what people might have to do to be considered digitally literate. I offer this as my “starter guide” to digital literacies in HE.

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Spent the morning acquainting myself with some of the features of academia.edu. My (limited) profile is here. In the publish or perish tradition there is a facility to upload citations for your papers and conference “talks” and list your research interests but there is no facility to list the courses you teach. Clearly a site designed by and for academics However my interest is more in how (and if) to use academia.edu as part of my PLE/eportfolio/working practice.
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