Tek4L

It is good to see that the ‘Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants’ concept is being questioned

http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/01/19/digital-natives-and-spaghetti-sauce

I agree with D’Arcy that the concept of ‘digital natives’ and ‘net genners’ is an overgeneralisation. These labels were good to get discussion going, and yes a bigger percentage of young people may be more comfortable/in-tune with technology than the ‘old folks’, but fitting into the digital world is as much a personality traight as a generational one. I have four children and while they all tinker around a bit with the computer and online things, three off them struggle with some things, and have to ask the fourth one for help, who is just naturally much more competent in this area.

As the title suggests I think some people are digital naturals, some aren’t. The only difference with the younger generation is that an early exposure to things digital has perhaps predisposed a large percentage of them to be ‘naturals’. But there are a huge number of people in the 30+ age bracket that are even more ‘Digital Naturals’ than the 30- age group - after all it was this generation that invented the digital age!

Perhaps we could liken it to rhythm - some people have it, some have a little, and some just don’t have it at all. However, if you expose a large number of children to intensive music education from an early age then I have no doubt that a larger percentage of them would be able to keep the beat on the dance floor, than from a second group that had no formal music education - but there would still be some from the second group that would do it naturally.
So perhaps we should drop Digital Native, or even Digital Natural, and go with Digital Groovers

Thanks to a link in a recent comment by Leigh on my april 7 2006 post just listened to a keynote from Rob Curley.

Although it is looking at online newspapers/journalism there are some great thoughts/concepts here for online learning, and as Leigh states “Imagine if we had 1/10 of the engagement and dynamism of this in education!”.

Three comments/ideas from the keynote that stand out:

“In the new millenium jounralism can no longer be a monologue, it has to be a dialogue with our readers”. Surely that applies to education as well.

The other concept was that of hyper local journalism. As Rob Curley pointed out, there was no way his local paper could compete with CNN for international news, so their online paper dedicates itself to local news and this has been the key to its success. Food for thought here for institutions involved in learning. Perhaps the key to success is in going hyper local/hyper specialised, rather than trying to compete on a global scale.

And the final point was his comment about their youth oriented service. They set this up completely separate to the newspaper, with its own identity. One of the reasons being that a newspaper run by an over 40s editor trying to pretend that it appeals to a young audience just doesn’t work. The same thing goes for institutions and elearning companies trying to set up their own social networking sites, etc. they just can’t be hip. I can’t help thinking that if the social networking/web 2.0 concepts are to have any impact on education, and appeal to learners, they need to be kept separate from the traditional institutions.

Following on from my previous posts about PLEs (June 15 2006 and June 20 2006) I see Wolfgang Greller and Stephen Downes are both questioning if the PLE needs to be an application:

The question therefore is: If learners are totally capable of blending various environments together, be it flickr, VLEs, messaging tools, mobile phones, television, etc., why would we want some middleware to do just that?

http://wwwu.uni-klu.ac.at/wgreller/wordpress/?p=109

Stephen adds

What, indeed, is the value-add of the PLE?

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=37442
he has moved his blog so link was not working at last check

It seem to me that the value add is for the education technologist and institutions, not the learners. The only reason a PLE has to be an application is so ed tech geeks can apply for lots of funding to develop it, and so institutions have an easy way to ‘manage’ and ‘assess’ all of the learning that is now taking place outside their learning management systems.

Just in the process of rewriting the Forum module in Interact and using the dojo framework to add some ajax functionality to the interface.

Despite the rise of blogs, and other forms of asynchronous communication, I think there is still a place for the good old threaded discussion forum, particularly in online learning, but the Interact version is in desperate need of a revamp. Have had a look around for some other forums that have added some ajax to the interface and came up with the following:

http://bbpress.org/
http://www.planetblur.org/beta/
http://getvanilla.com/

I have some ideas about what the perfect forum in a learning context should include:

• Easily identify new threads, posts, or old threads with new posts
• Ability to easily view all posts by a particular learner and see their posting profile
• Wisper function so comments on a particular post can only be viewed by a selected learner
• Easy quoting system for referencing other posts
• Subscription options, email, rss, etc.
• Draft/Published options
• Tagging options
• Bulk downloading of threads into a spreadsheet for more detailed analysis of discussion

to name a few - now just need to get busy coding. If you have any features that you would love to see in a discussion forum let me know!

An interesting new applications that takes the 43 things to-do list type functionality and applies it in a tertiary learning context (thanks to Derek for this link):

Lots of discussion around about the iPhone. There is some talk already on various education blogs/lists on whether this is  the device that will push mobile learning forward. It may help, but I think it would be dangerous to pin any learning delivery to a proprietary device.

Although the iPhone has some great interface innovations there are a few reasons why it may not be the killer device that mobile learning pundits have been waiting for, mainly due to the limitations listed at http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/10/6559 and http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/01/10/the_five_bigges.html, but apart from these things, I think it would be dangerous for anybody to pin mobile learning delivery on a proprietary device.

None of the key functions of the iPhone are unique to it, voice calls, text, camera, video, email, mp3 player, etc. It may do some of these things in a more useable/stylish manner than other devices, but that would be no reason to limit any possible learning opportunities to it. As I am sure most people would agree, mobile learning, or for that matter web based learning should be as device independent as possible.

Well, finished the moved from http://glen.interactlms.org/

Needed to try and refocus a bit, and a change is as good as a holiday! After bit of messing around, managed to get all the old posts imported to the new blog. Gone with WordPress instead of plog. I was hoping to just host it at Wordpress until I discovered you can’t add any javascript on their free blogs so have had to install my own copy.