tech-ed collisions

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(online) learning spaces

This week I started Stephen Downes and George Siemen's 'Connectivism and Connected Knowledge CCK09' course. What I found particularly exciting about it (apart from the opportunity to learn something that will hopefully turn out to be really interesting for me and also to interact with many other people via the Web) is their approach to the learning space for the course. While there is a Moodle environment in place there is an expectation that participants in the course will use their own personal learning environments (PLE's) and the course conveners are reaching out to those environments rather than impose their own upon the participants. I find this really refreshing. Already the number of blog posts, tweets etc that are proliferating is staggering. I guess this is also a great way for them to test their theories in some way on connectivism (although I don't profess to really understand what it all means). To date I have started my own blog quite separate from other online presences that I have as I particularly don't wish to muddy this blog with my naive reflections on connectivism and it will be interesting to see how I go learning in a potentially quite public (at least to those who follow the course tags closely) way. In discussions that I have had this week with education systems there is an increasing desire to move to more user-centric than system-centric desgin for learning spaces but there still seems to be some very stringent conditions upon these environments. We still seem to be a long way off truly 'personal' PLEs so it is great to participate in something like CCK09 to see what can be achieved.