Tony Hirst from the Open University is going to talk about ‘Figure:Ground – PLEs and the Flexible Learning Environment’ at this year’s EC-TEL workshop on mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLE’08).

Coming as we do from the technical side of the ed-tech fence, it’s sometimes worthwhile stepping back for a minute and considering not only potential student users of PLEs, but also the teachers and VLE maintainers.

In his talk, Tony will explore some of the assumptions we make about content availability when putting together PLE recipes, and consider the extent to which approaches to teaching/instruction – and the way in which activities and assessment are structured, and how content is made available to students – need to be borne in mind for PLEs to be useful: maybe the use of PLEs will naturally fall out of changes in the way we teach and make content available? Maybe PLEs will only work if we change the way we teach?

To ground the discussion, Tony will review several OCW/OER projects (including OpenLearn, and the MIT OCW project), showing how the content made available can be disaggregated into a form that affords the possibility of its reuse in a PLE. I will also demonstrate how the use of tagging within a ‘blogged’ course provides an emergent and easily visualised ’self-disaggregating’ mechanism for content in which different narrative strands naturally emerge through category and tag RSS feeds.

Posted by fridolin.wild at August 31st, 2008 under Conferences and events

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 06:27 and is posted under Conferences and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.