Have to [little reluctantly] Agree with John on this:
“Ah, well, the game is up, it seems, for Glow, Scotland’s ambitious programme to bring a fully-web-based learning platform to each and every pupil and teacher in the country. Euan Semple does not like Sharepoint! And Ewan McIntosh probably agrees with him!
Perhaps all we need is Web 2.0: social media, social networks, podcasting, wikis, file-sharing”
John comes around to reconciling himself with the fact though that Sharepoint is an appropriate application forSott education-”However, in the real world inhabited by real teachers, pupils, local administrators of education, corporate ICT realities and networks, each at their current levels of knowledge and capability, we would crash and burn if we were to try to build the collaborative environment we need only from the basic Web 2.0 tools plus all those tricksy little playthings that fill yards of blogging inches every day of the week.”
“Sharepoint, at the end of the day, is simply a platform – I think it just hurts some people that it happens to come from Microsoft”.
Paper written by Ron Oliver and mark McMahon for The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (2006).
The main findings (based on series 7) from my POV are:
- The use of stable and powewrful CMS provides strong support for designing online learning units [wonder if this is a reflection of Tassies experience with Learning Edge-maybe skewed the outcomes?]
- Many LOs hold strong contextual connections with their original use which can limit their re-use [central to a LO appraoch has to be developing them independant of context]
- The use of LOs appears to ahve a strong fit with teachres design and development strategies [not sure what this means]
- The use of LOs can discourage the use of task oriented designs [again this is more a reflection of poor learning design approach]
- The majoity of LOs are tutorial in design. There appear to be far fewer content and information objects from which teachers can choose [does this imply teachers want content objects? I would have thought tutorial objects wouldembarce the notion of 'information objects'/these are possibly teacher classifications and not learningdesign descriptions]
- Teachers would be advantaged by better descriptions of Los to aid their discovery and selection. [maybe a reflection of poor repository/CMS organisation-]
and most significantly I think: Teachers do not appear to be inclined to seek to customise LOs.
If this last point is generalisable, then we should question the extent to which we keep dissagregating resources, perhaps teachers only want to use complete modules/courses off the shelf. Not all teachers want to repurpose material.
PLEs (Personal Learning Environments), will be an ongoing theme for this blog. Currently causing increasing fringe interest, as there is a growing discussion around issues such as Web 2 and what constitutes formal and informal learning. Many commentaries are in relation to differeneces between ePortrfolios and PLEs. But this is an important distinction, as I think PLEs are more about the individuals own learning portfolio – independant of any formal course work- as distinct from the ePortfolio which Is see as being the ‘personal’ side of a students work in relation to a formal course. ePortfolios include the formal assesment artefacts from any such course, plus other related aspects of coursework. It might contain a history of matreial relating to all coursework undertaken. In contrast the PLE is a more holistic collelction of materials, evidence, artefacts and maybe collaborative/social networking tools which together constitute a true profile of the person’s formal and informal learning-evidence of where they have been and maybe where they are going in terms of career, thinking, knowledge and being. The concept of a PLE wold seem to have arisen from the need to differentiate between the VLE (Virtual Learning Enironment) and the emerging engagement of learners in their own knowledge spaces. I have attempted to depict this in the diagram to illustrate the relationship between the two worlds. This is a refinement of Scott Wilson’s depiction.
I’ll add a paper shortly which elaborates on this diagram.
