Saturday, June 18, 2011

Networked Learning Ecologies Part 1

A Vision: Networked Learning Ecology: A mesh of open, free and participatory media (ICT's+) and situated learning that liberate humans to create networks for social, economic and ecological resilience. Voices: (Please add more in comments)

Leigh Blackall:


Stephen Downes:

  • Slideshare: Groups vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues



  • Stephen Downes identifies significant differences between networks and groups, along four major axes. Drawn but not discussed at the Future of Learning in a Networked World event in Aukland, New Zealand. This short video explains the drawing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/252157734


 

Florian Schneider:

Roberto Greco:

More to come....

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

On Networked Learning

Leigh Blackall presents a new view of learning that is critical, open, networked and participatory through his research.  In a recent twitter stream and blog post he is asks for collective and open deliberation for a definition of networked learning.  As a participant involved in networked learning research and praxis I will offer the following as an entry into the collective imaging and deliberation.

Definitions


Open: Learning is free from institutions or understood to be actively participating in non-institutional learning.

Critical: learning does no harm or actively works for social, economic, and environmental sustainability and resilience.

Participatory: learning is integrative and inclusive of participants regardless of skill level or pre-determined social hierarchy.

Networked: learning happens in a blended mesh. Learners, pedagogues, and others are nodes that exchange information to different degrees, depths and forms both online and in the field.

The best defense of these definitions I have found is presented here by Steven Downes:



Image above: Watts and Strogatz model/small world network graph, credit: Arpad Horvath