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Why don’t we talk about PLEs anymore
I know some people will immediately respond to this title by declaring “I do! And look at all these other people who do”. And yes, there is a PLE conference. But my sense is that we don’t use the term, or more significantly, discuss the concept of Personal Learning Environments, like we did in 2010 say. This is not to disparage the term or work on it, I think it was very useful to frame the difference in the way we began to operate when all these new, easy to use tools suddenly became available. I’m interested from an educational technology perspective in what the decline in its usage tells us.…
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New home
I’ve finally (after 8 years) moved from Typepad to WordPress, and even more importantly, my own domain. Blame Jim Groom, that guy just wears you down until you say yes. Have tried a new theme, expect I’ll mess around with it and also widgets. If you’re here from the old place and use an RSS reader (I know, who uses them now?) then the new feed is https://blog.edtechie.net/feed/ All you WordPress geeks out there can tell me what plug-ins I must have. Time to start annoying the neighbours.
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The iceberg model of OER engagement
I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to ever use the iceberg analogy… I've been pondering ways of thinking about open education awareness, and OER usage that might help shape OER policy. So here's one I want to try out. Open education in general, and OERs specifically, form a basis from which many other practices benefit, but often practitioners in those areas are unaware of OERs explicitly. It is likely that these secondary and tertiary levels of OER awareness represent a far greater audience, than the primary “OER-aware” one, so one can view the sizes of these audiences like the metaphorical iceberg, with increasing size as we push into these…
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Flipped learning – why openness matters even if you think it doesn’t
As I mentioned a couple of posts back, we've been working with the Flipped Learning network in the US. My colleague Bea De Los Arcos, has a good post about FlipCon, their annual conference. As I argued, Flipped Learning has the whiff of a commercial brand about it, but that I felt it was a useful approach for many teachers. And as Bea notes, the enthusiasm of teachers who Flip is notable, and that is surely a good thing. In my Battle for Open book I make the argument that the direction of openness is important to all of us. But I think it's sometimes hard to make that connection to…
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MOOC completion rates DO matter
It has become accepted practice amongst those who know about MOOCs to sniff at completion rates. Focusing on them (hell, even mentioning them) demonstrates just how constrained you are by the old ways of thinking daddio. I find this particularly from the cMOOC crowd, and I've stopped talking about them, because as David Kernohan suggests, to even talk about them is like saying you hate learning. The commonly used argument against completion rates (or even worse 'drop-out rates'), is that they aren't relevant. Stephen Downes has a nice analogy, (which he blogged at my request, thankyou Stephen) in that it's like a newspaper, no-one drops out of a newspaper, they…
