November 21, 2006
Are PLEs Actually Social or Collaborative Learning Environments?
I had a tinker with StringLE over the weekend to fix badly broken styling in IE and add support for user configuration of the toolbar and stylesheet. As I was doing so it struck me that most of the tools I have in the default setup are social tools.
For example, the StringLE default setup links to a chatroom, whiteboard and Flashmeeting, which are best suited to synchronous interaction with other people.
(Remember - tools appear in the Tools tab.)
Several other tools, whilst personally useful, also have a social dimension, in that they support (asynchronous) collaborative working (that is, document editing can be shared with others): the wiki, drawing tool and social' document editor, for example.
The 'personal' tools include the searchfeedr search engine intermediary service and links to a webtop, map generator and online video editor. Even then, the map is intended for sharing and searchfeedr can display other users' saved searches, as well as allowing you to search over other people's saved links.
Coming as I do from the how might we use "web 2.0" toys to support user created personal learning envrionments? position, it strikes me that just as many social tools are personally useful, personal learning environments can (should?) draw on a wide number of socially useful tools?
It may even be that collaborative group work using online tools is one way of driving individual students towards their personal use of online tools if that's what we want to encourage?
Anyway - back to StringLE. You can now customise any or all of the following URLs via the StrinGLE URL:
* the navigation OPML file,
* the toolbar feed,
* the 'splash' HTML page (that is, the page that loads in the Web tab when you first load StringLE),
* a CSS stylesheet and
* an included Javascript file (the Widget panel).
The toolbar feed is a delicious feed from a specified delicious user (or user/tag) combination. Links that are tagged with stringle:tool are pulled into the toolbar. For example, http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?t=psychemedia/officeDemo&s=http://www.open2.net pulls in links from http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/officeDemo that are also tagged with stringle:tool. An additional tag can be used to define the label used as the link text for the link. In the example given, stringle:WordProcessor sets the link text as WordProcessor. The above URL also sets the splash screen to Open2.net.
All but the Widget panel feed can be configured from the StringLE configuration panel:
Hitting the Set URL button loads StringLE with the new configuration.
The configuration is also bookmarkable from the Link to this page link.
Full details here.
(I am going to start documenting StringLE on the StringLE wiki and post about it less here. To keep up, you may want to subscribe to the StringLE wiki changes feed.)
Posted by ajh59 at November 21, 2006 10:54 AM