blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for informal learning
July 22, 2007 at 9:43 am · Filed under Gender, higher education, informal learning, second life
As a newcomer to higher education, to teaching and learning in this environment, I’m still working out my “What’s it all about Alfie” stuff, the questions that make you stop and think. There’s always a why question buried in my thinking.
So … what are we supposed to be teaching college students? I ask myself that in my own doctoral studies: What am I supposed to learn here, that I can’t learn somewhere else or in some other context?
It’s an important question and immediately relevant because we are asked to provide evidence and be accountable for what we are doing.
If we say we’re teaching students how to think, is that too broad or is it in fact what we want? We want biology majors to be able to think like and do like biologists.
But what about SL? In the Fall, we’ll be teaching students about Virtualities: Mapping Virtual Worlds onto the Real World. There is no one thinking framework to do that.
The one I’m going to use is the Avatar/embodied experience one.
I spent almost the entire day in SL yesterday, in one or the other of my 2 Avatars. The bulk was spent in my non-professional self. I haven’t quite thought this through, but for now, my thinking about it is in terms of having ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves. In the private one, my first life identity is deliberately ambiguous and opaque.
With my public self comes transparency. My profile links to this blog and pICT’s website. I interact with in world residents who I also know as out-of-world professionals. My SL name (Aurili Oh) is part of my email signature
February 18, 2007 at 5:05 pm · Filed under informal learning, learning, ways of knowing
What makes Foucault a challenging read? The complaints I’ve heard most often are his long and winding, illustrative sentences. That’s exactly it. He fills his sentences with illustrations and explications that intellectually ornate. He’s utterly French, even in English. The trick, I’ve found, is to know that’s what he’s doing, to fast-forward ahead, then circle back, summarizing along the way.
What a workout.
February 18, 2007 at 8:15 am · Filed under TheWeb, higher education, informal learning, web2.0
What is an online course? What is an online education?
When it was launched in 2002, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) was emphatically declared to be a limited online offering. “OCW is not about online degree programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll,” wrote Phillip D. Long. It was intended to be nothing more than “the content that supports an MIT education.”
The understated message in an initiative such as OCW is that an MIT education is not equivalent to the resources that support the education, that it consists essentially of the contact with the professors and the community that develops among the students.
We talk about learning in terms of design and environments more than in terms of lesson plans and classrooms. The mix of course, content, people and place seem to be shifting dramatically. This has to do with how technology expands complexity, the ways information is co-created and disseminated via Web 2.0, how Web 3.0 (SL) releases us from the dichotomy of real/virtual, and how underneath all this the nature of information and knowledge is changing.
February 16, 2007 at 10:51 pm · Filed under community of practice, informal learning, knowledgemanagement, web2.0
What’s worth learning and who’s at the center of it. This symposium on personal learning environments is available via text and video. There’s still some work to be done on PLEs. I’ve just started working with Zoho’sWriter, part of a suite of office productivity tools. And am I’m trying to bring Citeulikeinto my PLE. I access these via browser links; the locust of control is my browser(s).
July 23, 2006 at 8:45 am · Filed under informal learning
I like the metaphor of connecting the dots because it’s both simple and reflects how the brain works when its learning. There’s this dot: My interest in doctoral work was initially and still is motivated by a desire to add to a body of knowledge.
then there’s this dot:The work of social change has many forms and faces.
Then this one:Producing inquiry and research in a knowledge economy means you produce capital, you create capital. You add to existing capital and fundamentally change it
there’s more
It’s not good to frame life only in terms of a market, as does neoliberalism; it is necessary however to attend to the workings of this way this collective way of knowing
and to point to it, name, question it
June 4, 2006 at 12:21 am · Filed under Students, informal learning, social computing, trends
An informative article about the latest controversies surrounding MySpace.
What is MySpace? Why is it important? How big is it (and its cousins such as Facebook)?
What is the controversy over MySpace? Is it that site in particular or as a genre of web-based-social-networks?
What is the direction of your current research on new media, and how does it relate to the controversy?
What do ’social networking software programs’ provide participants? What’s their down side?
What skills do students/children learn in working in social networks? How does these contribute (or not) to their development?
and more.
June 3, 2006 at 11:09 pm · Filed under distributed learning, educational technology, informal learning, learning, social computing, web2.0
This paper is chock full of ideas nicely pulled together:
informal/formal learning, bricolage, peripheral participation/lurking, social software/learning management systems to name just a few. I’m increasingly intrigued by conversations that distinguish issues of learning from issues of teaching.
