Archive for the ‘CoP’ Category
Digital Habitats – Stewarding Technology for Communities
Technology has changed what it means for communities to “be together.” Digital tools are now part of most communities’ habitats. This book develops a new literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities. Whether you want to ground your technology stewardship in theory and deepen your practice, whether you are a community leader or sponsor who wants to understand how communities and technology intersect, or whether you just want practical advice, this is the book for you. You can read the first 45 pages of Digital Habitats now.
Engagement in MOOC and Community of Practice
Based on my past experiences with CCKs, PLENK2010 and other MOOCs, the community is quite different from the “typical” communities that we would define, as there is no distinct boundary for the community. Instead of a community, in MOOC, it consists of numerous networks and communities which formed and re-formed, with some sustained, and some re-configuration in the network-community that formed. MOOCkers might have morphed along conglomerate networks, or social media as the weeks progressed, thus staying on with a particular media for sometime, and/or created blogs for a particular purpose, and then, engaged with others for a while. This seems to behave in a self-organised manner, without any directions from any facilitators, but then the individuals within particular networks would set their own agenda, goals, or tasks which suited their needs.
Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0
In this paper we argue that it might be useful for educational institutions to actively explore alternative frameworks such as complexity theory, communities of practice, connectivism, and the underlying threads of emergent learning to inform their planning and strategy. We will attempt to bring together elements of all these areas of research and practice to develop a framework for emergent learning that can be applied across education, work, and social networking, with their increasingly blurred boundaries.
We explore the following:
- What are the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish?
- What mechanisms of validation are effective, can emergent learning networks be self-correcting, and if so, how?
- Is it possible to link, or even integrate, emergent and prescribed learning, and if so, how?
Read also: Presentation
Content creation
One of the most important digital literacies students require today is the ability to create appropriate content. Content creation is an important feature in many personal learning environment (PLE) models, and together with organising and sharing, makes up the cardinal triumvirate of skills that provides learners with a clear advantage. If you subscribe to constructivist theories of learning, you will understand why the creation of content is important in any context. We learn by doing, and we more actively engage with learning when we create artefacts that can be shared within social contexts such as communities of practice. Artefacts are a material outworking of knowledge creation, and according to Vygotsky, they can be aids to solving problems that could not be solved as effectively in their absence.
