Year: 2007

Jon Dron and I were pleased to see Stephen Downes’ comments on our proposed “Model of the Many“. The model focuses on the communication among the many at three levels of granularity the group, the network and the collective.

We’ve been trying to map the model to current and projected Net based learning activities and interventions. Stephen suggested that we could do better in labeling the largest granular level, which we referred to as the “collective’. In this post I try to further define the characteristics and affordance’s of the “collective” and then argue why the term collective works – at least until someone can help us with a better term!!
Read More

Jon Dron and I have been having fun developing a paper for ELearn in which we’ve been wrestling with the distinctions between three granularities of social software. In the process it has helped me to clarify Stephen Downe’s distinctions between groups and networks, the way that certain tools seem optimized for different levels of these granularities (for example blogs are better for networks than for groups) and it has helped us to create a rationale for use of collectives in formal education. Jon has defined the three granularities of Social Learning 2.0 in a recent blog posting.

In this post I provide graphic overviews of the three followed by a table comparing the three applications for educational use.Read More

I have been waiting for a couple of years now for a work that successfully ties together the emerging social software/web 2.0 scene with established theory and practice of distance education. Unfortunately, I didn’t write it myself. However, Jon Dron has created the first in what I assume will be a series of writing, research and experimentation (his and the work of many others) that helps us harness the affordances for enhanced learning provided through a ubiquitously connected lifelong learning population, an abundance of learning content and judicious use of agents to make it easy.

In a nutshell, Control and Constraint in E-Learning explores how to move beyond distance education’s roots as independent study, through the tight cohorts of students moving lockstep through teacher orchestrated activities, to a context in which ‘many learners, loosely joined” can have the freedom and choice to co-create their own learning. A tall order this, but one that is very much coming to a computer near you!Read More