• "Someday I will write a memoir"
  I was trying to understand why, from day 1 until now Dave Winer has been ever present in my stuffed (and frequently cut back on) aggregator. Cos of stuff like this, that’s why… it’s such a human experience… forget the memoir Dave, go for the soapie ;)

I’ve put is a proposal for the HigherEd BlogCon 2006 based on the PLE post from yesterday.

It’s a fully online conference and the deadline for presentations is Jan 31st so why don’t ya give it a crack. They don’t seem to mention anything about price just yet so I’m hoping it’s free… perhaps someone could tell me?

Here’s where to go to put in your submission.

Update: “It is free. There will be some for-pay Webcasts in addition to the presentations on the blog, but all the best stuff should be on the HigherEd BlogCon blog (especially if we keep getting terrific proposals).”

Seems like there’s a big wave ‘o people talking about PLEs in some pretty major terms.

Stephen, for example, says this:

It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre and where your teachers – if there are any – are your peers. It is, I believe, the future – and where, one day, the next generation of Blackboards and WebCTs and Moodles and Sakais will make their mark

Derek interviews Oleg Liber who provides a fascinating insight and should be a definite read / listen (although I *strongly* disagree about the efficacy of a desktop based environment, but that’s another story).

Terry is absolutely going off on one as well:

The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests (including their formal and informal learning), connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds…

But what really got me tapping is this:

Although there is something quite compelling about the vision of a lifelong learning environment that is centered upon and perpetually belongs to the learner, I think we are some distance from being able to operationalize that vision.

As I’m not sure I agree. In fact, I reckon that right now we’re limited pretty much only by our imagination and ambition, and in tools like Elgg and WPMU we’re not far off cracking it. Yeh, major institutions aren’t going to start switching their LMSs to our PLEs any time soon and yes security, ip, maturity and (above all IMO) the structuralist transmissive models that LMSs on the whole play up to and re-enforce make this a difficult journey, but having said all that…. stranger things have happened.

I think that there are essentially only two key components that you need for the kind of online learning environment / tool (another good Liber point, are they really environments) and these are content/admin and communication. In the first instance (as you can see on the diagram) I reckon content/administration essentially comes down to course materials, assignments submission (this can be submitting a link too… just that it’s that ‘official’ step), personal enrolment details like address / contacts etc., calendar functionality for group organisation and a synchronous meeting environment for organised group or class get-togethers.

Not so exciting so far but do give me a moment….

This is of course the good stuff… three links essentially to a fully featured personal blog / Content Management System, a personal aggregator (which would, of course, simply opml export to your aggregator of choice) and some course aggregation features so that you could quickly browse latest postings in your course, details of teachers and students and other useful stuff like that :) Naturally all of these links would be database driven and pretty much entirely pre-populated with the exception of the capacity for teachers to prepopulate areas of personal aggregators either manually or automatically based on groups (there’s a group generator behind this as well… you just haven’t seen it yet ;)

Still not convinced? Well, OK then, assuming that the personal aggregator can be pretty much explained as Bloglines-esque (there are plenty of open source aggregators that could fit this mould) and that the course aggregation is simply a matter of automatically aggregating particular information (and posts of course) into various categories based on a few meta-tags (that will have been automatically inserted through enrolment details) then the real juicy bit is of course the blogging system whereby your learner actually ‘learns’ through the creation and development of posts, the linking, synthesising and pinging of other posts and by commenting on yet more posts on other blogs. So how do they do this? Well…

So, with this kind of blog the categories are automatically generated by the metadata of the students enrolment and they can then, nice and easily, post to that course (and / or the group which they are part of in that course). And if they want to view other postings in that group, or general information, or course material (if they’re authenticated… which they will be) then all they have to do is click on that course link and they’re there. Bingo.

Naturally they also are able to use this for posting about other stuff (they can just create another category or use their general one), creating assignments and all sorts of digital media, developing portfolios (now there’s a possible cool use of structured blogging!) and all that other stuff.

So for a teacher they simply prepare their course content, dates etc, and figure out what tasks / activities and deadlines they;re going to use (nothing more than a regular course really). They then facilitate by posting on their own blog (they can also mass email users / post news of the course aggregator… just to get the message home) and commenting on learners. Easy peasy.

For students they have their blog from day 1 and for each course they do they post to the relevant category and interact with other students and the teacher either through that or through linking. They’re able to refer to previous postings in future courses, demonstrate learning, develop some *serious* digital literacy and a fair bit more.

And of course, it incorporates subversion left right and frickin centre.

“But James, you’re dreaming, who’s gonna build this thing? Who’s got the time? The money?” I hear. Well, it could just be the schizoid paranoia but I’m taking a guess that it’s the wolves of blogland coming to trounce my amateurish and naive idea.

Not so I say. In fact I’ve been leading you down a bit of a garden path (sorry) in suggesting that there I’m talking about two separate environments here. Because in fact I’m not, I know one that only needs some tweaking and a bit of programming and you’ve got exactly what I describe above.

Check it out… WordPress as represented in WPMU has a very very powerful space called a ‘Dashboard’. This is where your content and administration sits, or, at the very least the links to the relevant courses content as uploaded in some simple system that your IT guys put together in 25 minutes. Assignments submission is simply a matter of a form and a drop-select (and add in some nice things like retrieve and edit and you’re really laughing), personal enrolment details can be represented and edited from here as easily as they can anywhere else. There’s no shortage of open source calendars if you’ve got a little time to fix ’em up and of course you can use and link in whatever synchronous environment you want. As for personal and course aggregators… the potential in tools like Gregarius and FeedWordPress is pretty huge too.

So there we go. Do you fancy one?

• Thomas Winston Thorpe is having an identity crisis
  Memorandum inspired cute-as theme from Thomas with excellent hedgehog riposte. Nice.
• edu_RSS 0.2
  Just had to link to this, especially because: "It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre and where your teachers – if there are any – are your peers. It is, I believe, the future – and where, one day, the next generation of Blackboards and WebCTs and Moodles and Sakais will make their mark" But even moreso because it marks the launch of edu_rss 0.2, something that I would dearly like to play with, once I’ve um, learnt Perl.
• BlogSafety.com
  Good stuff, important resource.
• Blogging Places
  This is fascinating but why oh why isn’t there a printable version… come on Kairos!

One thing I’m pretty excited about doing in the next few months is presenting at and participating in a Key Forums Conference on blogs, wikis and RSS in Sydney in March.

It’s going to be particularly interesting for me as in the first place it’s somewhat of a different crowd of people (um, it’s over $2k a ticket) which will no doubt lead to some different perspectives and conversations (as well as some whole new jitters ;) and in the second the quality of the other panellists is something to behold!!!

I mean, sharing a bill with Trevor and Mick is a pleasure I’ve had before and didn’t know I was going to get to repeat and add to that Frank Arrigo, Des Paroz and Josh Bancroft among others and well, it’s going to be a cracking couple of days.

So if you have a couple of grand to spare ;) why don’t ya com along… or better still get your organisation to pay for you to!!!

It’s in Sydney, 29th – 30th March.

As you’ll probably have guessed if you’re outside Aus it gets hot this side of the world about now and, surprise surprise, the damn smarties down here decided that that would be a good time for ‘summer’ holidays. So have been walking, eating good food, hanging out, kicking back and generally doing the holidays thing for the last few weeks… a la July/August up there in yon cold Northern climes.

So, you will by now totally understand (of course) why I haven’t got back to your email over the last few weeks and even moreso why it may just get deleted in the flurry of clearing up that’s going to take place today.

Apart from that though am back and raring to go, my 2006 wish-list is coming soon but for the meantime I’ll leave you with some abstract notion of surfing santas. Happy new year :)

Wow.

Well there have been ups and downs this year but I’m too exhausted to go into them now… maybe that’s a January thing.

However, yet again it’s been a delight to be part of this space… to talk / argue / meet / read and generally enjoy spending virtual (and real) time with all the excellent people that I’ve met through this little ‘ol blog.

A peaceful, joyful and fulfilling Christmas / Holidays / New Year to you all!

And here’s to next year, some major changes, many interesting developments and much much more of the same :)

I’m not sure why people bother really, I mean, you can go and set up a spam blog at edublogs.org but you’ll also have to supply a valid email address, go in, post to it and then get over the fact that when there’s only 20 or so being created every night I’ll just delete them in a couple of minutes… it’s not like you can add adsense either!

Large enough to work, small enough to care :)

So whoever you are 202.88.237.54 you’re wasting your valuable spam configuration attempts on me, seriously, go and bother someone with more blogs!

OK, well, a second as I won a couple of books when I left my crappy school aged 18 ;) But more importantly, a decade or so later edublogs.org has won Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme at the edublog awards and even better that that, edublogs.org powered Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search won Best Library/Librarian Blog. I think “w00t!” is the appropriate expression, no?

Congratulations to all the other nominees & winners and big thanks to Josie for running the whole operation so successfully.

Well, according to the incredibly limited media coverage (more interested in the fear and loathing of what might happen) there were only 1500 people at the march yesterday. I beg to differ (the video clip below doesn’t seem to show up in Bloglines so you’ll have to visit this post to see it)…

Was a good way to spend a Friday afternoon, with a great bunch of people, here’s hoping there’s no trouble this weekend.