June 18, 2006
Stephen Downes - The Students Own Education
I've mentioned a couple of time how I attended three separate PLE related event over the last couple of weeks: a talk at the OU by Stephen Downes, and a couple of CETIS events on PLEs. Here at last is a summary (in note form) of the things I took away from the first of these...
Stephen Downes - The Students Own Education [the lack of an apostrophe is deliberate...]
Prelude - the changing nature of identity.
Before - identity as belonging, part of something.
After - identity a creation, as a set of connections: "I am defined in part by my relationships and creations." [How does this tie in with the idea of social networks and online created identities (e.g. Bebo or MySpace?)? How could connectivist learning draw on these personal social constructions for educational benefit?]
Today at the Institution....
Student belongs to us, logs in to our VLE, navigates according to course structures in OU context.
Student generated content is on OU server.
But increasingly questions of 'who owns this'? [This is really important for us, I think, where we encourage students to participate in online conversations/conferences. If the students were in an informal seminar, they may take notes. If they are typing into an electronic conference, they don't need to take notes because they are communicating via notes. The difference is, the notes expire when the conferences expire (or at least, lock out the students) shortly after the end of the course. If we get stdent to blog and contribute to wikis. will they have access to that content at the end of the course? at the end of their OU degree/relationship?]
Brian Lamb, in a talk ?somewhen/where?, mentioned offering students wikis - but they said 'no thanks, we have one, outside'.
Work needs to belong to learner in a meaningful way for them to care enough to practice. The learner is in control.
What's happening out there - the net generation is creating its own media, it's own content.
e.g. MySpace - identity is dynamically created. Blogs and wikis. Wikipedia. Photos, podcasting, vodcasting, YouTube:
[interesting: youtube.com on OU campus -
"Access Denied
Access to http://www.youtube.com/ has been restricted as it is in the pornography category.
If you require assistance please contact your ITSP or, if you are using the public access terminals in the Library, Library Customer Service."
That's the first time I've seen on e f thse notices before...
]
From LMS to PLE:
PLEs
PLE lends itself towards an exploratory form of learning.
MyGlu: aggregator with built in filtering using regular expressions. [cf. SuprGlu]
SD's thoughts on a content creation tool/candidate functionality for a PLE: RSS writr: content pane for viewing content, editing pane for creating content, opportunity to upload content (description here).
[I sort of get this in my extended browser anyway - Firefox with the Performancing for Firefox (PFF) blogging/note taking extension; Flock actually has these things built in (due out in Beat any time now out in Beta)]
The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read— and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.
Reading is the first part of working with content.
Some advantages of PLEs:
- persistence;
- identity; multiple identities on multiple systems. Shibboleth only federates across HE sector. PLE offeres possiblity of ditributed identity self-identified by me to other institutions.
mIDm (my - dee -me?) - identity essentially equivalent to a URL.
what mIDm is not is an authentication service. That is, websites have to take the user's word that they are who they say they are. But what it does do is to provide any user who wants it with a unique identity. ... The proposal is dead simple.You - a web user - create a website on which you create a program you can log in to (you don't have to do this yourself - you could use a program someone else created to do the same job - but the point is, you could do it yourself.
You then place the address of that program - its URL - into your browser.
Then, any time you go to a website, if that website wants to know who you are, it gets the URL from your browser and sends a request to the program. "Who is this?" the website will ask. "This is me!" the program will reply.
How does the website know that you've sent it to your program, and not someone else's? The same way Feedster or Technorati or Blogshares allows you to 'claim' a blog. It gives you a little bit of code which you then place into your program. Because you have to log into the program, only you could have placed the information there. So once the website gets the little bit of code back from the program, it is satisfied that you, indeed, are the person described by this program.
[ cf. OpenClickin ;-)]
See also: YADIS.
Increasingly likely to see students authoring and repurposing learning resources - which means that need a way of managing digital rights.
http://www.downes.ca/dwiki/?id=DDRM - need to find a way of readily supporting creation of rights metadata.
Do we need a PLE at all?
"The PLE is an approach not an application."
The student's application need not be a learning specific application - it may be (should be?) a general application. [Yes - e.g. students may use their own email client, wordprocessor, web browser, feed reader etc. if they want. We probably do nee to have an institutional environment for people who want it, but these should also support protocols that let students use their own clients if they want to...]
Resource profiles [need to read this - didn't really grok the message here...]
PLE not simply allow you to read and write content but also allows you to create different sorts of metadata e.g. microformats. Leads to self-organising content, connected by relations based on how the content is used -> semantic social network. [structured blogging? What forms of structured blogging would make sense in an educational blogging environment? Does EduPress have educationally oriented structured blogging built in?]
Q: PLEs to date seem to be about creating persistence. Are you a fan a building an environment?
A: why would I want to keep stuff on my desktop? [I actually think there is something to be said for having local copies of content, as suggested by the Portable PLE/USB Study Stick idea, which I need to develop a bit more, I think...]
SBS - seem to be talking about a personal infomation management system. The learning is then mediated around the content that is being provided to me [surely the agenda with which the content arrives?]
A: Learning resource is only a learning resource when it is being used for learning.
PIM becomes PLE when it is used for learning, and it becomes learning when the content is used in a learning process.
Q: SD seems to be advocating a PLE is a universal client that can be used in learning activities.
A: PLE is an intermediate step. SD is interested in how info flows, how it gets metadata added, how it gets used, reused, remixed.
MW - is there a social dimension to the RSS Writr PLE?
SD - yes, encompassed in the content that is pulled into the left-hand panel [this is e.g. a feed reader component; I guess there would be scope for a more generic client there, e.g. like Bitty Browser]
Can't force everyone to use the same tool outside the single institutional environment.
PLE goes outside the closed restrictive environment - that's the whole point.
MW - by using an institutional, single technology solution we don't have the interoperability problems.
SD - that's thinking within the single instituion model. And that's the thing that's changing.
A PLE is a set of capacities, not a single thing.