Networked learning

Conclusion of the article:

"Faculty concerns about the spread of online courses may be on the rise. Just two weeks ago, faculty members at Amherst College voted against participating in edX, the nonprofit collaboration founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, citing concerns about costs and about how “massive open online courses” would affect a residential campus devoted to small discussion classes."

This is a brainer !

Networked learning by definition uses all kinds of online tools to support learning. Those tools are often classified as web 2.0 or social web tools, although tools that facilitate information seeking and management still play an important role. Google+ is one of the social tools, that facilitates synchronous communication like many others, but is particularly interesting for its seamless integration with the rest of the Google toolbox. The article explains how to set it up - don't forget to read the comments! - and use it.(@pbsloep)

Many of the inspiring ideas of Sugata Mitra are presented often and therefore well known; this one was new for me: 

Steve: What is your vision for education in the next 10 years? What do you think needs to be done next?

Sugata: We need to rethink the curriculum, rethink assessment and rethink certification in an age where 'knowing' may be obsolete. Homo Sapiens will transition to Homo Deus in the next 50 years. Our preoccupation will be with meaning and creation. Knowing will not be our main interest - creating will. In order to create we will need to know things. When we need to know something we will have the means and the capacity to do so in minutes. A page of erudite text may take an educated person an hour to understand. A century ago it would have taken a month. A thousand years ago, a year or more. We could extrapolate to a time when it will take us a minute to understand. A generation or two later, one second. 

The human brain is evolving faster than anything has, ever before.   

Proof of great asynchronous learning

This post by Tony Bates begins with listing and discussing some more or less interesting developments in the MOOC world. One is about allowing people who 'pass a MOOC' into the regular, online programme in which the course features (this is essentially what the 'open' in Open Universities refers to), another is about courses that seem to adopt the name MOOC without really being massive or open. The latter probably prompted the remark quoted in full in the above, with which I wholeheartedly agree! We are well past the stage in which MOOCs are an experiment in educational technology, they now have been usurped by the 'market forces' and are used for their various purposes. Let's make sure we educators see through that and assess MOOCs for their educational merits or lack thereof. (@pbsloep)

Over a surprisingly brief period, the use of social tools and technologies has grown from limited experimentation at the edge of corporate practice to what’s now the mainstream. But after this strong initial uptake, many companies find themselves at a crossroads: if they want to capture a new wave of benefits, they’ll need to change the ways they manage and organize themselves, according to the results from our sixth annual survey on the business use of these technologies.1 A remarkable 83 percent of respondents say their companies are using at least one social technology, and 65 percent say employees at their companies access at least one tool on a mobile device. Ninety percent of executives whose companies use social technologies report measurable benefits from these tools, and what’s more, a small yet growing number of companies—the most skilled and intensive technology users—are racking up outsize benefits.2

Great posting!

Interesting read point of view from Donald Clark

Is a school dropout = MOOC dropout? Interesting note by Donald Clark. 

The best collection of numbers related to mooc participation I've seen - so far.  'Participation' is a difficult thing to identify and define in the original cMOOC formats, where it is possible to visit without signing in so whilst unique visitor numbers can be extracted for the core site, engagement is difficult/ not possible to ascertain for these mooc formats.  It is much clearer in xMOOCs, where sign-in is required and often fixed assignments are presented.  In addition, in cMOOCs, and especially in the longer lasting ones (e.g. the 9 month #Change11) the notion of 'participation' isn't based on weekly attendance but on accessing those resources and conversations of interest to that participant. 

So evaluating retention may be an illusion other than for some xMOOCs.

The comments on this blog are worth a careful read, they open discussion on many of the more nuanced points around completion v participation v 'persistence'.  The language used to discuss this is not trivial, as some terms shift responsibility for performance between provider and learner.

Great background information to build our understanding. I really like seeing them all presented this way for easy comparison. 

(Edudemic - 24 Déc 2012)

A very visual illustration of learning theory.

Although the above quote, which heads the short article by Fearghal Kelly, captures the content of what she writes, it misses the most important point. To quote her again: "... while our online networks can provide us with the opportunity to interact with a broader group professionals, we will only realise its full potential if we can convert our networks into communities".

It is the dynamic between communities and the larger network that they are part of that make online, networked learning and professional development so different from the past and so rewarding. The article describes it well, from the shortcomings of the offline communities in the past, via the broadening of the horizons that blogging and Twitter afforded, back to the personal interactions in the online communities of the present. Although the network and the community level are related, in my opinion still a lot of work could be done to wedge them together more intimately and more productively. How do network members know about useful communities other than through word of mouth? How do communities become associated with particular networks other than by accident? It would seem there is a lot of room for recommender systems that mine these communities and networks to come up with suggestions for new and useful alliances and groupings. (@pbsloep)

This looks at how online communities help professional development. I think it is true those with PLCs could likely benefit from an improved mixture of the PLN connections blended more effectively  withPLCconnections there are also many teachers that really have very small local PLCs. Many are the only one that teaches a subject in a school and local outside inspiration in the past was hard to come by. This is where online Professional Development Networks have an amazing ability to reach and inspire those in isolated content areas.