LearnHub

Good links and stuff! Keep it coming!

Thanks! good catch!

Sorry, but i can’t find the link to have the confirmation resent… please advise. Also, there seems to be some sort of bug that won’t let me pick Wysiwig editing. It keeps switching back to the other option when i try to save my preferences. Thanks

Great!

I guess i care more about gratisware/freeware than moreworkware… I am not a programer, and don’t want to be one, though i am willing to contribute feedback and make features requests when i feel i need them.

Cool! Could you make one on Google as well?

you could always try tellin your students “you won’t need to write for this assignment” ;)

Diigo! www.diigo.com awesome for bookmarking, underlining, tagging, and sharing links. Private groups are a breeze to create, and very easy to handle.

Google Docs should be pretty high on the list too…

Take a look at http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/index.html to see what other educators, e-teachers and education-related people list their top 10 tools.

I used a couple of months ago, when delivering a workshop on “Enhancing the reflexion part of the learning cycle” (from Kolb). What i did was ask the participants what their experiences were regarding the topic and built in real time a mindmap (concept map) based on their comments and feedback. Since the map was projected on the whiteboard through a screen projector, all the participants could see and comment on the map as branches and ideas were typed.

It was a very effective way to summarize their opinions and experiences, and helped them clarify what they said and meant to say, and then allowed for a very natural deepening of the conversation on the aspects of their experiencies that neeeded more “polishing”, and then the inclusion of the proposals i had to offer. I can post the result in a separate lesson or whatever if you will, but it’s in Spanish currently. (This was in Bolivia)

I really like this powerpoint and the point it makes about being passionate when you present something.

Thanks for bringing it in here.

[on a sidenote, i find it interesting that we can import a powerpoint presentation from someone else and make it a lesson]

It turns out thatmy e-mail is “unverified” or something like that, though i do receive the mail warnings when there are updates i’m tracking… How do i get my mail verified?

To get a picture of how RSS feeds work, may i suggest you visit my public selected feeds at www.netvibes.com/vahidm

There you will see different tabs on subjects that i am interested in, and you can see that for each tab (ie knowledge mangement) there are different small boxes. Each box is a feed, coming from a website, a blog, (or some internet service in a few cases). They all contain headlines that really are hyperlinks to the articles that were published somewhere on the net.

On netvibes (and on other “rss agregators”), everytime you find a website that has the orange antenna thingy, you can add that website’s feed to your netvibes, thus making sure that you’ll keep track of what that websites publishes. Very handy for blogs and newsites. You should probably start categorizing your feeds as early as possible (ie Knowledge Management, Online collaboartion, organizational psychology, technology in my netvibes). You can always modify your categories or move your feeds around later.

Also, learning is achangin’ a lot. Cringely, that i linked here, makes quite a splash with a (optimistic?) societal level change affirmations: http://learning-2.learnhub.com/discussions/1479-post-by-cringely-on-societal-change-and-education

We already know that content creation has changed dramatically in the last 15 years, and that the internet now offers the possibility to every human being to post their thoughts/knowledge (if somebody can hold the webcam that will film you doing your thing or talking about it).

The game of publishing has changed, but the critical factor remains trust and authority, and Connexions has to give me that to become “valid” and “quote worthy”. I can only hope they succeed, and help bringing about world education ever so much accessible.

Good discussion, and thanks for bringing connexions up. I had seen the TED conference presentation, and the idea was compelling.

The thorniest issue to me in all this remains “who’s authoritative writing is this?”. If a printed books comes to my hands from a well-known publisher, and the autors’ descriptions sounds convincing, it’s gotta be good, right?

Since the Wikipedia scandals, we do know that you can’t really know who is punching away those keys and hemorrhaging the texts we are reading. Connexions better have some ways of asserting who is posting what content, and making sure that peers are reviewing it and grading it mercilessly.

If Connexions works on this in a disciplined manner, the potential output for worldwide education is just astonishing.

Yep, though it hurts to accept the fact, most of the math learned in high-school is unnecessary. It tries to go too deep, does not relate to everyday life enough, let alone being pertinent to real life experience.

Some more home finances and accounting classes would have been far more useful in my life than the more advanced stuff i learned in high school. And don’t get me started on geometry. There are, of course, jobs that do require very advanced math skills and operations, and high-school better prepare those young men for their lives… the rest can be learned in college.

Reasoning, logic, analysis and scientific method should be taught to everyone of course, because everybody should have those skills, but advanced maths doesn’t seem to pay off right now for most people. Reading skills, on the other hand, we need LOTS more, since reading is the gate to learning everything else.

Is it ok if i consider my diigo bookmarks (similar to del.icio.us), with all the features it now has, as part of my PLE? I register most everything i consider noteworthy during my surfing, tag it, and leave comments on most of my bookmarks.

There, i have created a couple of groups that other people have joined and contributed to, as well as joined groups of shared interests, thus enriching considerably my learning and access to noteworthy links…

Is that enough? What does a PLE look like? (screenshots?)

Thanks, short, well presented lesson. That’s granular knowledge/learning for me!

Going to get a look right now, thanks!

It’s a fine balance for the learner/seeker to find an expert/teacher: he has to know more than him about the topic, and that person has to know enough about his topic to be of any worth, but also needs to be willing to share and know how to do it…

Of course, sometimes previous knowledge (embodied in the expert) is not available and then all participants must be willing to explore reality (practical or ideal) together, agree for action and carry out whatever they find to be true, and reflect upon what they have achieved.

“If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit. (Matthew 15:14)”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them” Werner Karl Heisenberg quotes (German Physicist, 1901-1976)

The right attitude, i think, is to be seeking the truth. Always, and Everywhere.

Now, who’s an expert in who’s eyes? I believe that experts can be found pretty much everywhere, but that they don’t necessarily have the right mindsets to share/teach what they have discovered/experienced.