Tuesday 3 July 2007

Things you might have missed

There are some people who are great at prompting you to look at things you'd otherwise miss and Steve Mackenzie is currently [*no resting on laurels Steve!] one of those guys. Steve's blog, which supports his MA, has a few nice postings on connectivism, alongside Becta's report on emerging technologies, by Stephen Downes.

Now I tend to lose track of time and miss stuff that I shouldn't, so it's good that some emergent and contentious issues are being flagged by others in our Pathfinder team. In particular, I like this quote in the Becta report to which Steve draws our attention:

"Learning occurs in communities, where the practice of learning is the participation in the community. A learning activity is, in essence, a conversation undertaken between the learner and other members of the community. This conversation, in the web 2.0 era, consists not only of words but of images, video, multimedia and more. This conversation forms a rich tapestry of resources, dynamic and interconnected, created not only by experts but by all members of the community, including learners." (Network Pedagogy section, 6)

I also like Steve's single sentence Web 2.0 definition: "Web 2.0 is connectivity - through self expression and technological simplicity." I used that one on my old, history, special subject tutor who set up a group on Facebook and invited me in, but had no idea what Web 2.0 was. He liked the notions of self- and community-expression and loved the notion of simplicity.

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