Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

In David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course students were asked to randomly choose and then examine 5 MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and 5 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) courses. I’ve done random examinations of OCW/OER in the past, so I changed this up a bit to fit my own inclinations: first, I made my choices semi-randomly (more…)

Mark Crane pointed my attention to the following video recording of Richard Miller addressing academics in the humanities re. new media/technology and the alteration of the acts of authoring and publishing (more…)

For reference here’s a quick run-down of Creative Commons (CC) v. 3 licenses with comments on their usefulness for open education. As most of you probably already know, CC provides a means by which creators can license their works differently from pre-existing intellectual property licenses. In the USA the two options have been copyright or public domain. CC provides for lots of options in between (more…)

I was working on a task for Dave Wiley’s IPT 692R course which asked me to summarize the history of the open education movement. I had begun by reflecting on the history of the internet, particularly the aspects of conflict between creators, consumers, and copyright holders. This, I figured, would help me lay out in my own mind a context for considering both the history and the future of open education. With a little tongue-in-cheek mirth and zeal for the future of openness, I typed out the following take on the history of the Internet (more…)

Those of you with PHP experience may already know by reputation how easy WordPress is to modify, and I’ve been having a lot of fun customizing themes for the past year. This is a quick and dirty post illustrating how to customize a WP theme to select a Creative Commons license for each post. (more…)

Doug Johnson wrote a short post decrying “competitive blogging” as suggested by various awards, such as the “Eddies” and authoritative ranking systems such as technorati. Doug rhetorically asks, “Do we really want competitive blogging?” I posted my answer in the comments: “Yes.” But I should have been more specific (more…)

Chris Lott captured most of my thoughts and feelings about the Personal Learning Environments All-Day Workshop that we conducted with Scott Leslie, however I wanted to reciprocate to my co-presenters and the participants by posting a few comments and observations (more…)

Tony Hirst was looking for a way to output all XML element names and PCDATA in a document and show hierarchical relationships. I guessed this was easy, so I tried but initially failed. I searched for an answer and was surprised when I couldn’t find a good one. An hour later I worked out a solution based on parent::node() that seems stable on all XML files. (more…)

My first attempt at drafting a map of my personal learning environment came out better than I expected. I didn’t utilize any of the physical space metaphors I’d planned to use, instead opting for a fast mapping solution through Excel that showed strong relationships (matched edges) as well as weaker relationships (arrows).

PLE Mapping, Draft 1
Originally uploaded by Mr_Stein

You’ll note that I did not limit myself to technologies, let alone Web-based tools as some have been inclined to do. I’ve used all tools, utilities, and resources that make up my actual environment for teaching, learning and professional/creative production.

I know much of the discussion of PLE’s centered on the idea of using technology as an all-containing hub, and while I see significant usefulness in hubs (my own primary hubs are Google Reader, Twitter, and my own blogs) I am beginning to believe that a single hub is not the answer, and PLEs should not be encompassed by a single product or service. For instance, Ron Lubensky defines the primary goal for a PLE as follows:

The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. … PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts…

I have two problems with this goal as stated:

1. It is akin to the goals of monolithic learning management systems, and seems to vie for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Scott Wilson with the Personal Learning Environment blog says, “It’s an unfortunate tendency especially in our sector to take a concept (PLE, e-Portfolio) and attempt to reify it as a product.”
2. Because individuals with several generally distinct interests likely have multiple origination/entry points for learning, one all-encompassing, multitudinous hub may not be optimum for effectiveness (it may in fact be distracting; I’ve found this to be the case with a fully-loaded iGoogle home page)

Speaking of my several generally distinct interests, I was initially inclined to separate my teaching and creation activities from this map. Arguably not “learning” by some strict definitions, but certainly from a “learning by doing” perspective. At any rate, teaching, creating, and learning seem to me to be inextricably intertwined.

Before responding to the (apparently provocative) question posed by Chris Lott this week, “What does your PLE look like?”, I have one genuine question that precludes defining one’s PLE (playing into the indictment of the concept in what D’Arcy Norman initially showed as his PLE) is what is the utilitarian scope of a PLE? Presumptively we are primarily talking about networked utilities (e-mail, Web) but clearly also just plain digital utilities (computer, files [I think Ray mentioned desktop searching]), now how about the physical realm? My office? My phone? Pens and papers? My bookshelf? My colleague’s office? The library?

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.