Virtual Canuck

Jon Dron and I have been having fun developing a paper for ELearn in which we’ve been wrestling with the distinctions between three granularities of social software. In the process it has helped me to clarify Stephen Downe’s distinctions between groups and networks, the way that certain tools seem optimized for different levels of these granularities (for example blogs are better for networks than for groups) and it has helped us to create a rationale for use of collectives in formal education. Jon has defined the three granularities of Social Learning 2.0 in a recent blog posting.

In this post I provide graphic overviews of the three followed by a table comparing the three applications for educational use. (more…)

During the last eight years of his life the Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan worked on developing and validating four “Laws of Media” He argued that every new media Enhances through new affordances, Obsoletes through improvements in form, function and cost; Retrieves older patterns of behaviour and Reverses when over stressed into older, non functional patterns.

This work was published posthumously in text in 1988 as the Laws of Media: The New Science and covered in the 2002 NFB video McLuhan’s Wake. According to McLuhan these four immutable laws effect all media and understanding them helps us to fathom both the intended and the unintended, the positive and the negative aspects of every media. McLuhan was fond of challenging readers and audiences to think of a medi that did not demonstrate all four laws or to think of the 5th law or argue why they should be reduced to only three.

Dale Hunshler (2001) overviews Mclulan’s wider theories and notes how the web itself, illustrates the four laws of Media.

In this post I extend that work by very briefly applying McLuhan’s Laws to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).

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I have been waiting for a couple of years now for a work that successfully ties together the emerging social software/web 2.0 scene with established theory and practice of distance education. Unfortunately, I didn’t write it myself. However, Jon Dron has created the first in what I assume will be a series of writing, research and experimentation (his and the work of many others) that helps us harness the affordances for enhanced learning provided through a ubiquitously connected lifelong learning population, an abundance of learning content and judicious use of agents to make it easy.

In a nutshell, Control and Constraint in E-Learning explores how to move beyond distance education’s roots as independent study, through the tight cohorts of students moving lockstep through teacher orchestrated activities, to a context in which ‘many learners, loosely joined” can have the freedom and choice to co-create their own learning. A tall order this, but one that is very much coming to a computer near you! (more…)

I am certainly not the first to ponder the relative merits of blogging inside or outside of education’s closed garden walls (see Bill Ives Is Blogging Inside the Firewall an Oxymoron?) However, I’ve recently seen a couple of presentation by University innovators using blogging – but from behind the institutional firewall and password protection – inside the ‘garden wall’. This of course resonates with some of the large LMS (VLE) builders who are adding blogging to their suite of (closed) applications. But, the presentations left me with a skeptical notion of the value of this learning activity, especially given the availability of threaded discussions which are often much easier to use and more familiar to both students and teachers as a blog.

A significant value of blogs and most other social software is the capacity to extend and develop networks beyond the limited circle of ones existing place-bound friends. Social software can of course be used to enhance or support place-bound communication, but it is sort of like driving a car on the sidewalk – gets you to destinations, but its slow, bumpy and often inconvenient to others.

So why do teachers develop learning activities behind the ‘garden wall’? (more…)