monika’s w e b l o g

Day II.
Stephen Downes talks on “E-Learning 2.0 – Platform, not medium”.

Content extract:
Distributed, client oriented environments (opposing centralised environments) ask for sensible design principles:
- Decentralisation (the mesh is more stable than the star)
- Distribution (different physical locations reduce the risk of failure and the need for major infrastructure)
- Disintermediation
- Disaggregation (of units of content, of education by unbundeling)
- Dis-integration (entities in a network are not “components” of one another)
- Democratisation (entities in a network are autonomous; diversity is an asset)
- Dynamisation (it is through the process of change that new knowledge is discovered)
- Desegregation (learning is not a separate domain and does not need learner specific tools)
The traditional LMS (Learning Management System) should give way to the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) as an approach.

Additions:
I find that Stephen Downes’ two podcasts (2004) “New Directions in Learning (part 1)” and “New Directions in Learning (part 2)“, both appr. 1h, form an extended background for this dense lecture.
He talks about the change in how we see knowledge – learning – community; he compares learning objects to objects in OOP (David Stiller explains the concept of objects for Actionscript in his blog): they have attributes, are placed in an environment, may interact; Weblogs and RSS.
I would like to cite two propositions he makes in the podcasts:
“The direction of e-Learning in the future not as static course based resources assembled and delivered by institutions, but rather e-Learning as a dynamic, unstructured stream of learning resources, obtained and organised and for that matter created, remixed, repurposed and fed forward by learners.”
“The mechanism of producing and publishing learning resources is the same mechanism as the mechanism of producing and distributing blogs and this is largely the same model that humans have when they learn things. We can create experiences using that kind of network.”
(http://www.downes.ca/files/audio/yukon2.mp3)

Thoughts:
I am going to explore RSS|XML technically as a next step, after listening about how Stephen Downes did set up Edu_RSS. Understanding the technology better will help to think of consequences of eg blogging|new possibilities through this kind of informal learning, both for learners and for the educational institutions.
Appendix (20.06.2006):
George Siemens writes about this keynote as well in his blog and provides the link to Stephen Downes’ PPT-slides.

June 17th, 2006. von Administrator.
Kategorie: conferences. .