Teach and Learn Online: Die LMS die! You too PLE!
"The PLE project recognises the fundamental flaws in Virtual Learning Environments or Learning Management Systems (VLE, LMS), but falls short in its vision of an alternative. At this stage in the project it is suggesting that the PLE be a desktop application for a student (sounds a bit like my old Perfect LMS idea) or a singular portal online.
At risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll have to repeat my defining question about Internet enhanced learning, but this time in response to the PLE.
Question to the PLE: Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment. Actually I think the PLE idea is better envisioned by the futurist concept known as the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC). I think we already have EPIC, so why do we need the PLE?
To extend the statement: We insignificant little teachers and our out of date schools and classrooms don't need to be investing in media projects like VLEs, LMS and even PLEs. Our dam walls of knowledge have burst! and no amount of sand bagging will stop the flood that is clearly discrediting our authority over learning. Media, and with it communications, will evolve (as it certainly has in the last 50 years or more) well beyond the limitations of our classrooms, with investments and broadcast influence we can't even fathom. Why waste our precious money and time on projects that only serve to suspend our true position within that media scape. The PLE makes me think of ELGG, and it all makes me wonder why it is we educationalists still think we are even relevant anymore. The people (yes that includes us) are learning how to read and write for themselves, and in an amazing act of collective generosity, the people are teaching each other - why do they even need our classrooms... is it perhaps only credentialism that we offer? Or is it also sense of security and safety? Is it false?"
(Leigh Blackall, 13 November 2005)
Fig.1 "Lords of Graphite" by 5star (Neil Caldwell).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Slacktory: the only blog on the internet (this seems legit)
"Born July 2011, Slacktory is a comedic blog about the pop culture of the internet. Editor Nick Douglas, sous-editor Henry Birdseye and a team of talented freelance contributors analyze, abuse and satirize the rest of the net.
Slacktory is a part of My Damn Channel and the My Damn Channel Blog Network."
(Nick Douglas)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Peggy Orenstein on our gender performance culture
"Peggy Orenstein ('Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture') and Kaveri Subrahmanyam ('Digital Youth: The Role of Media in Development') had a conversation about girl culture and digital media for Googlers in Santa Monica on February 9, 2011. They were joined by Adriana Manago, who works with Kaveri at the Children's Digital Media Center (UCLA/CSULA)."
(About @Google Talks, 9 February 2011)
Fig.1 Kaveri Subrahmanyam talks to Peggy Orenstein about "Cinderella Ate My Daughter", About @Google Talks [18:24]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing
"Of course, other kinds of assignments involving visuals do occur in college writing pedagogies. Visual analysis (especially advertising analysis) has been commonplace in postsecondary writing instruction for at least fifty years as a part of the post-World War II emphasis on propaganda and semantics characteristic of many composition and communication courses beginning in the 1940s, but that practice did not always or consistently include careful consideration of how images, layout, or graphics actually communicated meaning. Instead, advertising was treated as a subject for critique rather than itself a form of communication that employed both word and image" (Diana George, 2002, p.21).
"If I have given the impression that the media revolution of the fifties and sixties was a tough one for [writing] composition teachers, then I must say here that the world of graphic design, electronic text, and Web technologies certainly will prove even more difficult, though ultimately perhaps more useful for future understandings of composition as design. As with written compositions, Web pages must have an internal coherence; they must, in other words, be navigable. Unlike written compositions, the internal logic of a Web piece is likely to appear first in the visual construction of the page - not only in the images chosen but the colors, the placement of text or links, the font, the use of white space, and other elements linked more closely to the world of graphic design than to composition pedagogy. The work of Anne Wysocki is useful here as she challenges writing teachers to rethink their notions of what composition means - beyond the word and inclusive of the visual. Wysocki writes, 'When we ask people in our classes to write for the Web we enlarge what we mean by composition. None of us are unaware of the visuality of the Web, of how that initial default, neutral grey has a different blankness than typing-paper' ('Monitoring Order'). And whether it is true or not that their teachers are aware of the difference between the blank screen and the blank page, our students are certainly aware of this difference. Many already compose for the Web. Many have worked in the realm of the visual (or the virtual) as constitutive of composing texts of all sorts years before they get to their first-year college courses."
(Diana George, 2002, p.26,27)
Fig.1 Photography: She is Frank, Styling: Tessa O'Connor, Hair/Makeup: Megan Harrison, Model: Bree Unthank @ Giant Model Management [http://wearehandsome.com/a-handsome-project-she-is-frank/]
2). Diana George. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing," College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 11-39.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
American Conservatory Theater's No Exit: blurs the lines between film and theatre
"Fresh from sold-out performances across Canada, Jean-Paul Sartre's redefined classic makes its U.S. debut at A.C.T. A mysterious valet ushers three people into a shabby hotel room, and they soon discover that hell isn't fire and brimstone at all -it's other people. Sartre's existential classic, skillfully reimagined through the perspective of a series of hidden cameras, turns the stage into a cinema, and the audience into voyeurs, as a thrillingly staged 'live film' takes place before your eyes. A.C.T. continues its tradition of welcoming the work of innovative international artists to the Bay Area with this riveting multimedia event."
(American Conservatory Theater, 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
