After a nightmare journey, and a “no room at the inn, so walk round Maastricht all night looking for coffee shops” adventure, I fumbled and raced through a version of Figure:Ground – PLEs and the Flexible Learning Environment at MUPPLE’08 Workshop on Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments yesterday, and closed with a promise to post the presentation (such as it is) and some relevant links…
So here are the slides, (although I didn’t get round to annotating them, so they’re unlikely to make a lot of sense!):
And here are some links:
“Vision of a PLE” – a couple of people picked up on the “my PLE” image I used that included offline media and social context alongside the typical web app offerings; you can find the original here: Mohamed Amine Chatti: “My PLE/PKM”.
The OpenU’s OpenLearn open content site can be found at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk. Unlike many other open content sites, the content is published in the context of a Moodle online learning environment that users can join for free. As well as providing a user environment, OpenLearn also makes the content available in a variety of convenient packaging formats (print, Moodle export format, IMS packages, RSS, HTML pages) that allow the content to be taken away and reused elsewhere.
Openlearnigg is a corank (Digg clone) site that pulls OpenLearn course unit URLs in via OpenLearn course listing RSS feeds, and then embeds the OpenLearn content within auto-generated course pages using a Grazr widget fed by OpenLearn unit full content feeds. OpenLearningg this uses OpenLearn syndication tools to mirror the content offerings of the OpenLearn site within a third party environment.
Something I didn’t mention was a pattern we’re developing for republishing with a click the OpenLearn content in WordPress environment (WP_LE). One of the widgets we have developed allows users to subscribe to “fixed” (i.e. unchanging) blog feeds and receive one item per day from the day they subscribe (which provides some all-important pacing for the user).
THe “MIT Courseware refactoring as syndication feeds is described in An MIT OpenCourseWare Course via an OPML Feed and Disaggregating an MIT OpenCourseware Course into Separate RSS Feeds, where I show how the feeds can be used in a Grazr widget to provide a presentation environment for an MIT OER course. I seem to remember the feeds were all handcrafted… You can also find links to the demos from those posts.
The Yale opencourseware feedification story is briefly covered in Yale OpenCourseware Feeds, along with links to each level of the nested Yahoo pipes that do the scraping. RSS Feed Demo from Yale Open Courseware gives a quick review of one how one of the pipes works.
The UC Berkeley Youtube video feeds/video courseware search are described in UCBerkeley Youtube Playlist Course Browser & Video Lecture Search and UC Berkeley Lectures on Youtube, via Grazr (the search part).
One of the aims of the MIT/Yale OPML feed doodles was roundtripping – taking an OER course site, generating feeds from it, and then recreating the site, but powered by the feeds. Getting a feel for the different sorts of feed could be bundled together to give a ‘course experience’ by reverse engineering courses is a stepping stone towards automatically generating some of those feeds using contextual searches, for example.
The Digital Worlds uncourse blog experment explores using a hosted WordPress blog as a course authoring environment, and the approriate use of tag and content feeds as delivery channels (the Visual gadgets uncourse blog does a similar thing using Blogger/Blogspot). Some of my reflections on the Digital Worlds creation process are in part captured in the weekly round-up posts that can be found here: OUseful 1.0 blog archive: Teaching and Learning posts. There’s also a presentation on the topic I gave to the OU CAL research group conference earlier this year: Digital Worlds presentation.
Stringle is my string’n’glue learning environment, as described in Stringle – Towards a String’n’Glue Learning Environment
(the URL structure is described here: StrinGLE URL “API”). Martin Weller also had a go at describing it: Stringle – almost a web 2.0 PLE?.
ANd the final link – was that was to http://ouseful.info, which currently resolves here, at the OUseful.info blog: https://ouseful.wordpress.com.
PS The whole “figure:ground” thing comes from psychology/studies on visual perception, though it turns out that Marshall Mcluhan also started using the phrase to capture a distinction between communciation technologies (the “medium”, viewed as the figure) and the context they operate in (the ground). I keep dipping in to odd bits of Mcluhan’s (and some of them are very odd!) and this medium/context is probably worth thinking through in a lot more detail with respect to “PLEs”.
OUseful.Info, the blog... 