My experience with Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 has been tantamount to climbing Mount Everest. The amount of sustained energy required to maintain an upward assent has been extraordinary – with many colleagues turning back or stopping along the way – but in this lay one of the key sources of its engagement, and one that tied students together into a unique, shared experience. It’s been absolutely incredible.
Every week yielded a fascinating new topic to be explored, and with it an even greater amount of tangential discussion. …

Editor’s Note: At one stage this post had a point, but somewhere along the line it seems to have derailed into a rant against the establishment.
Criticism
The challenges and obstacles facing the evolution and revolution of education can be traced back to a few key ideas – those of stratification, hierarchies, institutionalisation, power, and control. Essentially, characteristics that have nothing to do with education and learning, but everything to do with how it is controlled, dictated and managed.
Schools have come to symbolise clearly structured environments where teacher presides over a …

Thanks to Sarah Stewart, I’ve just discovered a really cool way of creating engaging video clips from static images. From the about page:
“Animoto is a web application that, with the click of a button, produces videos using images and music that a user selects. Using their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor & director, the resulting video has the emotional impact of a movie trailer and the visual energy of a music video.”
This is my first attempt and I suspect there will be many more …