A revision of the talk I did in Colombia in '08, slides 53-59 are really the new part where I try to introduce the need for additional practices to counterbalance the tendency of the network to focus on the perennial "now"
37. ME Friends & Trusted Acquaintances Edubloggersphere / Friends of Friends Circles of Trust Blogosphere / Trustworthy Sources BLOGS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING MICROBLOGS / PRESENCE TOOLS SEARCH SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICES WIKIS Read each other faithfully Comment on each others blogs Strong conversational ties Follow each other on twitter In each other’s IM clients Read some but not all Find new folks through trusted ones, comments, links The Web Browser The basis for my ‘ lijit’ searches Technorati / Other Blog-based search My friend’s lijit lenses Good source for Google Coop engines Part of my del.icio.us network Use “for:” links to share with each other Given them access to personal wiki The Almighty Google GReader search Don’t interact with them in this medium Some will use my wiki Will subscribe to each other’s feeds & channels Desktop Browser Email client Personal web server Personalized Toolbars, Extensions Bookmarklets Personal Media Production Tools Web-based Office Suites Wikipedia edutechwiki The serendipity of tags Some will see my links through feed or blog syndication Public social bookmarking effects googlerank, can establish online reputation Referrer logs & the power of positive narcissism The serendipity of tags wikieducator I use and contribute to others’ teachertube Creative commons search engines Flock ‘social’ browser Me.dium extension Trailfire extension OER recommender Create new connections/ build reputation by using external hosting services for rich media PMOG
39. Blogging Strong conversational ties; Read each other faithfully; Comment on each others blogs Read some but not all; Find new folks through trusted ones, comments, links Referrer logs & the power of positive narcissism Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
41. Social Bookmarking Part of my del.icio.us ‘network’; Use “for:” links to share with each other Some will see my links through feed or blog syndication The serendipity of tags Public social bookmarking effects googlerank, can help establish online reputation Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
43. Microblogging & Presence Tools In each other’s IM clients Follow each other on Twitter Re-tweets, Crowdsourcing Twitter search; #hashtags Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
45. Wiki / Web-based Office Tools Given them access to personal wiki; collaborate on Google docs I use and contribute to others’; they use mine Wikipedia cf. wikieducator, edutech wiki Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
47. Social Media Will subscribe to each other’s feeds & channels Create new connections / build reputation by using external hosting services for rich media teachertube The serendipity of tags Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
49. Search The basis for my ‘lijit’ social searches My GReader search My friend’s lijit lenses Good source for Google Coop engines Creative commons search engines The Almighty Google Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
51. The Browser Itself Flock ‘social’ browser OER recommender extensions Trailfire extension StumbleUpon Zemanta (semantic recommender) Me.dium extension Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
52. The network expands with who and how we learn We’ve always learned with others Yet now we can be apart AND “together” Learn not just “what” but who and where Help others and be helped by others we will never know Friends FOAF & edubloggers General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources Cohort Rest of Institution General Blogosphere/Trustworthy sources
57. What have I learned and how? / What do I need to learn?
58. Need techniques and tools to cultivate… blogs Wikis social media browser search microblogging social bookmarking Meta-cognition Focus Attention Pattern Recognition Reflection Personal librarianship Bullshit detection Network Awareness Collaboration
59. We need to add to/in the flow… blogs Wikis social media browser search microblogging social bookmarking Blog as “ outboard brain” Tag cloud/word clouds across services Browser history analysis Concept maps Peer/mentor feedback Recommender software
I am truly honored to have been invited to open up this educamp with a talk, though I regret that ME talking AT you is somewhat in antithetical to the dialogic nature of a “camp” session. Were I a better educator, I would have come up with a more effective “intervention” through which we could explore this together. Still I hope you will find this talk a useful starting point for your day and for discussion. Would like to tell you a story of becoming a networked learner A story of Why become a networked learner What a networked learner is How to become one What happens when you learn in an open and networked way I would like to stress up front; this is not intended to SHOW OFF my personal skills as a network learner. The whole point is that I am unexceptional in this, anyone can be a network learner, but it does require a critical engagment with ones’ own responsibility to learn
Sent my first email message via land-line connected Vaxen in 1979 from Montreal to Malaysia Remember fondly connecting my 2400 baud modem to our local BBS Was a member of The Well in 1992 Started working in 1993 building Gopher systems, quickly moved on to creating and administering web systems.
The growth in the number of people connected online doesn't matter (or that more and more of them have never lived when the Web wasn't around) The growing connectivity (over 50% of the world's population now owns a cell phone) and computing speeds is just an incremental change Web 2.0? Just a bunch of sites done by Mac designers Blogs...whatever, just glorified personal home pages Wikis...yeah, been there, done that
And enables us to change how we do things
We are no longer bound so tightly by the constraints of having to be in the same place at the same time in order to be “together”
In the past or communities were very often communities of proximity, created because of physical or temporal groupings. These are still important. But the network enables other forms of organization, groups of affinity as well as
The more people who see your work, the more feedback it can generate; the more feedback it generates, the better it can becomes; the more feedback it generates – virtuous cycles
As we go through this talk, while I will highlight the network and various network technologies, the network simply creates the enabling conditions for something truly different. There is nothing stopping us from simply recreating older forms of organization and interactions – indeed that is what the Learning Management System can be seen to have done
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwM4ieFOotA by Wendy Drexler
Notice that this learners acts of learning, the marks he leaves, by being open, have the potential for others to learn from them, to build on them, to connect around them
Learning on the network means greater opportunities for encounters with real practitioners
The network learner is actively involved in the production of learning content
Learning out in the open is scary, it means constantly showing the world what you DON’T know, showing yourself in a constant state of becoming But is that not TRUE Lifelong Learning
choosing learning goals and paths
We need to become network learners ourselves, for teaching in a “Networked Learning” scenario is about modeling yourself as a learner, how you yourself engage in the network conversation
Truthfully, I prefer the term “Personal Learning Network” over “Personal Learning environment” – it has less of a connotation of a monolithic, focuses less on the tools, more on people. But even it is dissatisfying in that it seems to highlight the individual alone, when instead I think what needs to be highlighted about this process is the autonomy of the individual learner *within* a larger network of other autonomous learners.
One of the simplest yet most important things that people often don’t do is fill in the profiles on the various services they use
Wanted to reflect why people often term this a “Personal Learning NETWORK” instead of just a “Personal Learning Environment”, that the people, and how we connect with them, are an equally if not more important aspect.
I originally called these “Circles of Trust” but I am not totally convinced about this term; “circles of shared context” may work just as well and be a less ‘charged’ term It is critical to note that these circles are not meant to be exclusionary. They are PERMEABLE; people are not kept out, instead the posture is one of always trying to invite others into dialogue
“ Blogging” is an activity that includes BOTH writing AND reading blogs. It is conversational, dialogic. To understand blogs as simply online “diaries” is to fundamentally misunderstand them; they are one of the first forms of “networked” writing in which authentic voice can be found But…it is also “just a personal journal” – my ‘offboard brain’. Something that one does first and foremostly for oneself, as a reflective practice, but as it is by nature NETWORK ENABLED, it can benefit from NETWORK EFFECTS
Everyone is familiar with the idea of storing their ‘favourites’ or bookmarks Social bookmarks is the practice of storing these instead on the network, where they can be shared and accessed from anywhere If there was only one practice I had to pick to help people start their personal learning environment/network, it would be this; it is simple, something people already do anyways, but the benefits can be immediately seen Many alternative services like diigo, or ones that can even be hosted locally like scuttle
Plugins Greasemonkey Zemanta My Examples Context search (build/find new searches with http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ and OER recommender - augment the web with related OER resources - http://www.oerrecommender.org/help/demo.html Finding Books - http://tinyurl.com/6qxu4y WorldCat/Amazon plugin Library Lookup Bookmarklet Using Zemanta to draw in related materials to blog posts on the fly - http://www.edtechpost.ca/readingulysses/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=8 Other Resources we likely won't get time to explore Ubiquity - http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/ plugins like Trailfire, PMOG see also http://8-p.info/greasekit/ for Safari cf. http://delicious.com/nessman/opened_presentation
Howard Rheingold - The five key elements to digital literacy are: Attention / Participation / Collaboration / Critical Consumption (Crap detection) / Network Awareness
See also http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2008/06/20/google-coop-on-the-fly/ OER search engine