Anne Marie Cunningham brought a post to my attention this evening that has really got me thinking about distributed models for online learning, and in particular the technical elements I believe need to be in place to establish a framework that affords the most opportunities to teacher and students.
As always the more holistic elements such as literacies and the cultivation of a nurturing participatory learning culture amongst students and teacher are of equal if not greater importance – but considering how late it is tonight I’ll be hard pressed to …

I just discovered a series of clips on YouTube featuring a presentation given by Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, about his book “Free Culture” and have created a playlist of them.
It’s a fascinating look into the history of copyright law and why openness is so important.
Unfortunately embedded YouTube clips are currently breaking the entire page here for users of Internet Explorer, so rather than embed the playlist I’ll have to just refer you to YouTube for now. Click on the image below to go to …

I’ve just joined the Social Media Classroom, a project initiated by Howard Rheingold and funded through a HASTAC award, provided by the MacArthur Foundation. This project seeks to empower and support learners and educators via new means of communicating, interacting and collaborating, and which emphasises the importance of “participatory pedagogy.”
From the website:
“The Social Media Classroom…includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social …

I’m in two minds regarding whether it’s appropriate to post this presentation here (and may opt to remove the post if I change my mind, or am asked to do so), however given the fact several of my fellow students of CCK08 and FOC08 have indicated they are researching – or interested in researching – the educational uses of virtual worlds, I thought it worthwhile to share this.
This presentation outlines my preliminary thoughts on the SecondLife project I’m currently working on. Much of the content has been covered here …

I was asked by a work colleague to take the department on a tour of SecondLife at our recent staff meeting and spent a fair bit of time earlier in the week putting it together. Unfortunately it didn’t end up happening, so rather than let a perfectly good presentation go to waste I thought I’d transform it into a video that could be shared on the web.
Given a number of my online colleagues, friends and other contacts have begun to discuss similar questions I would suspect – or at …