Comments on: PLNs and OERs and TLAs make Me Want To…

By: Connections | Watershed

Connections | Watershed — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:19:02 +0000

[...] Acronyms also annoy me however I cannot escape them. They are everywhere. I tend to agree with the thoughts shared by Alan [...]

By: Those PLENKing Diagrams - CogDogBlog

Those PLENKing Diagrams - CogDogBlog — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:17:14 +0000

[...] Having complained plenty about the meaningless of some of the terminology, I am aiming to keep the mind slightly ajar, if not wide open. [...]

By: Now We’re Getting Open Insidious Pedagogy « Lisa’s (Online) Teaching Blog

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 02:44:20 +0000

[...] read the argument Alan Levine had with Nixty’s [...]

By: Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein » Review: Nixty.com

Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein » Review: Nixty.com — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:45:57 +0000

[...] I reviewed Nixty pretty thoroughly this week an co-wrote the following review. Michael Feldstein, Alan Levine, and others[1],[2],[3] have already provided some insights and serious commentary on the idea of [...]

By: Jim Groom

Jim Groom — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:53:03 +0000

Add to that the Chronicle post about Nixty.com as LMS hard candy: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Online-Course-Construction-/25732/

Crazy, the whole thing reminds me of what Bill Fitzgerald blogged about earlier, and particularly this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OieJ80KJj7g

“Did you come here today, just for cash?”

By: Jim Groom

Jim Groom — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:42:48 +0000

This is an awesome thread, and Alan the way you masterfully run the questions around LMS and the promise of Nixty.com (another corporate LMS that decides to do away with the professor) makes a new low point in higher ed LMSs, and simply points to a crisis. Not sure a acronym is behind it though, it is that sense of teaching as an art—and a rather complex one with the tools at our fingertips now. Networking becomes another way of conversing arounf that out in the open. Together, it’s a visiion of openness I embrace.

En fuego.

By: bandwagonesque: homophily, vuvuzelas, and the rhetoric of lists « Higher Edison

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:05:41 +0000

[...] absolutely everything absolutely has been tempered lately, my torrid love affair with the PLN dogged by a sense of semantic creep. Seems like you can’t swing a lolcat these days without [...]

By: Glen

Glen — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:21:57 +0000

Alan, the lessons tool actually provides a lot of functionality that is not available from a website creator. If you logged in, then I think you’d get a bit more perspective. However, that said, I don’t think the real point you are making is about the differences in the technology. Rather, I think your main point is that it needs to be more social. I agree. We’ve designed NIXTY to be social and added a number of social features, including: discussion boards, wikicourses, karma points, and eportfolios. We are now actively building the community and working with people to figure out what works best – what helps them work together optimally.

I also don’t have any “magic answers.” I don’t think any of us do. The question then becomes, how do you make progress? How do you get closer to creating an environment where people can harness technology and optimally learn together? I think you get there through creating, running experiments, and iterating. If this goes well, then we should know more in a month, 6 months, and 1 year out. It is going to be hard and we will make mistakes, but it will get us closer to solving these challenges.

In one year, to use your word, we will have a better idea of our pedagogy.

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:28:53 +0000

Glen,

I do not at all criticize your efforts to create a learning environment around open content. However, it seems no different to me to the decade old dream of learning objects, there there would be easy ways to use software to string together smaller bits into a whole. Frankly your example:

organized and streamlined them — a person can watch the video, read the PDF, engage in a discussion board, take a quiz, in a very easy way. See example here: http://nixty.com/lessons/lessonStudentLessonItem?course_id=1042&lesson_id=48

makes me wonder why this is any better from anyone creating a web page, a blog site, that builds the context for a lesson around a video, a PDF. My blogged complaint it that there is no pedagogy (a word I rarely utter) at all in “Watch a video and engage in discussion”

I cannot really see the progress tracking w/o being logged in I assume.

Sorry, I’m not going to call and try to offer magic answers, I don;t have any. My sense is, as an environment, what I see lacking is any sense of social connections- a place that encourages people to interact, learn together and not alone — it is the correspondence course model (yes I know you will say a discussion board can do that, and while it can happen there via serendipity, it is not designed).

By: Graham Wegner

Graham Wegner — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 07:04:15 +0000

I think that maybe we all a small debt of gratitude to Leigh Blackall, for succinctly starting the Wikipedia verb that is threatening to continually morph into a noun with baggage.