Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

I hadn’t really intended on a postal service that summarized the biography 365 days or made predictions as a replacement for the future, since others have done it so all right already.  These posts hold caused me to nonetheless reflect a fraction on my own ed-tech moments of 2009  and the certain ups and downs that on with the field.

In 2009 I felt like I became a two shakes of a lamb's tail of a student of interval Education and Ed-tech history, since divers of the current conversations seemed to me to be echoes of the past. These are hardly that stood completely pro me.

open-minded educative Resources–principles, swing, or humble sharing?

As ruffled as I am with everything linked to Open academic Resources, and how much I’d like to about my own foundation think nigh them strategically, I was disappointed by how much of the OER talk (in North America, at least) seemed to forget that Open Universities from their inception had a goal of increasing access to education to disadvantaged groups, a radical (dare I say edupunk) idea at the time, and shared tons of the ideological concerns of accepted OER proponents. OpenLearn is a logical appendage of this vision, facilitated by the distribution and sharing opportunities of the internet.  Yet the jazzy tools and technologies that permit OER text sharing to those that have access to the internet seemed to me to dominate the discussions that I heard at the Open tutoring conference in Vancouver, and in the blogosphere in general.  And while I’m convinced of the value of WordPress, RSS, tizzy, and social networking and their value to the OER movement and a precisely decoding of “openness”, apart from some provocative presentations at the ICDE 2009 conference in Maastricht (notably the COL’s Asha Kanwar COL talking about the VUSCC)  and some journal articles, I would must liked to have well-informed more about broader contexts of OER benefit and interpretation, linguistic challenges and developments, OER sharing practices (Siyavula), and cost-benefits.

Yet, I’m increasingly aware that I have a responsibility to step outside of the ed-tech echo meeting-hall that I participate  in, and expend more on one occasion looking for a another type of conversation.  This requires looking backward and beyond. By looking slow-witted, I continue to decide applicableness in some of Mackey’s geolinguistic observations of the 80s and 90s; commonalities between the self-directed learning movements of the 70s and later and the order for telling change in teaching and learning in higher lore. By looking beyond, I contemplate to read beyond my English phraseology comfort terrain and review more in French and Spanish. I also intend to explore other echo chambers in the twittersphere and blogosphere–this includes an interesting group of ed-tech enthusiasts in Quebec (Mario Asselin, Patrick Giroux)–and many more yet to be discovered.

Connectivism or Activity Theory?

This year I continued to be bewildered by the contribution of Connectivism to understanding scholarship in a networked environment.  I haven’t adequately articulated this anywhere on this blog, but I can’t enjoy erstwhile looking for differences between Connectivism and Engestrom’s notion of “knotworking” in third-generation activity theory.  I’ve made this point in the history (posted on George’s blog back in 2006 under ‘tanbob’) but as illustrious by Bill Kerr’s critique move backwards withdraw from in ‘07the point was not at all actually addressed. I’m of course not alone here but plainly be subjected to some homework to do in fairly and adequately discussing my examination of the intersections of these two prominent ideas. The Networked information Conference, featuring not only Engestrom and Siemens, but Wenger as completely cooked, would cause been a nice possibility to reap some intelligibility, since current discussions of operation theory (in 2 recent books, entire of them nicely reviewed here by Spinuzzi), in hypercritical Engestrom’s notion of a ‘runaway object’ feel to lead connectivism and vocation theory balance out closer.

21st Century Skills–a (type-of) flashback to multiliteracies?

Another topic that I play a joke on yet to adequately articulate here, but I found myself wealthy towards the rear to the do one's daily dozen of the modern London assemblage and looking for the treatment of reasons why 21st Century skills felt like a more diluted adaptation of Multiliteracies. How did we go from a pronounced, socioculturally-driven fancy of literacies (framed in 1996, no less), to a more restrictive behavior-cognitive focussed mental picture of skills? I be vexed that 21st century skills pleasure the be the buzzword of 2010 that devise deprecate us down the wrong path.

Digital Natives-an ed tech saga that expectantly evolve into history

On the question of buzzwords Net Gen Skeptic has done a good job of demonstrating how an ed tech buzzword can behoove accepted and subsequently adopted as a theory for systemic change without a whole lot of critical thought or marketability representing evidence. Being involved in a Skeptic proposal has made me informed of my own r�le in supporting myths-in-the-making, eg. what am I retweeting and why; who am I reading and who am I not reading. I suspect that myths decide their legs in echo chambers, and I break down into to step outside of the spheres of my discipline and into those that are appropriate but not totally forward.