links for 2010-11-02

This is a substantial ebook and is available for free download from OECD. It should be a useful source of background for EE4L. It might be difficult to consider environments for learning without a clear understanding of learning.

This weekly newsletter typically has links to recent reports and research publications about education, including the application of ICT. Subscription, email is easiest, is available from the website.

This is a useful review of the current state of play with games in education from FutureLab.

UNESCO regional guide (Asia & Pacific) to pedagogy-technology integration includes background, material on 21st century skills, e-learning, blended learning, Web 2.0 tools, and more. It's doubtful there is much new here but it brings ideas together in a handy package.

The differences inherent in treating information as 'flow' rather than 'stock' have been discussed over the past few years and this paper extends that thinking. Traditional, objectivist, understandings of knowledge have encouraged us to see information as something that can be gathered and stored – in minds and/or libraries – but a connectivist view might be much more about the flow of information and our ability to tap into that.

In EE4L we can tend to think about technology and virtual environments to the exclusion of the physical but all that technology has to be used somewhere and it seems from this research that the physical learning environment can have a real effect on learning.

This vision was distilled from a group of European teachers. There are no great surprises but the 5 anticipated changes to school learning confirm what is being suggested elsewhere, including through the Oz DER. The 5 changes are: (1) Learning objectives will focus on competences rather than knowledge. (2) Learning will be more tailored to the needs of individuals. (3) Learning will be more active and connected to real life. (4) Technologies will be an integral part of learning and life. (5) Teachers will become lifelong learners themselves.
The report also identifies 5 challenges including the need for organisational change.

I haven't really gotten into note taking on the iPad. I'm usually trying to use it to deal with documents in a meeting so I'm reading rather than trying to do much in the way of notes. That might change with multitasking in iOS 4.2 or if I found the right app for the job so that I could take notes on top of an existing document efficiently. This MacTalk piece discusses a variety of current note taking apps for iPad.

This proposal for classes working collaboratively in wikis goes well beyond the walled garden of the LMS and into a genuine constructionist approach where the artefact is built in public view. There are some interesting ideas here that might have application in EDU8111.

Amazon does well with its recommender system so why not use a recommender for learning. This is an interesting example of the possibilities of crowdsourcing in education.

The distinction between complicated and complex systems is important. Merely complicated systems can be driven by plans and management processes. Complex systems respond poorly to top-down planning and need scope for new forms of order to emerge. Too much of what we are doing to improve education is designed to deal with complication rather than complexity.

I picked this up from the FLOSSE Posse blog but have not had time to explore it. It seems to provide a useful way of locating OERs.