The EDGEX2012 Primer

Over the next few weeks, as the countdown to the EDGEX Disruptive Educational Research conference to be held in New Delhi from March 12-14 begins, I hope to bring to you all news and updates about the conference and its themes. The EDGEX 2012 Conference has been carefully and collaboratively constructed to bring cutting edge educational research...

Pushing the Frontiers of New Assessments – EDGE2011

My talk at EDGE2011 in Delhi was part of a panel that was presenting different thoughts on cutting edge developments in Assessments. I specifically focused on the tracking data, metrics and corresponding analytics that could be found by using games and simulations (or blends of the two). When I talk of Games and Simulations, I...

PLE/N Tools

Really nice collection of links for this week's #PLENK2010 discussions. I especially liked Patterns of personal learning environments, Wilson. Wilson looks at patterns of use of and activity in personal learning tools and learning networks, revising a previous approach which was very functional and tool-specific. One of the ongoing challenges I have is with the...

PLEs and Connective Environments

With a little help from Jatinder, a kindred soul in the making of simulators that happen to attract Brandon Hall Awards, I tried to visualize a model of PLEs operating in a connective environment. It started with a reply I made to Janet and Carmen on what I think should be: ...let us contrast the...

Connectivist and Constructivist PLEs

Is the PLE a connectivist construct or a constructivist construct? Or both? Or neither, just influenced by many theories? A statement by Wendy Drexler in her paper prompted this question. I quote: Principles of connectivism equate to fundamentals of learning in a networked world. The design of the teacher-facilitated, student-created personal learning environment in this study...

Is content king?

I have really been wanting to write about this news article ever since I saw it some time back. The company, Demand Media moved to #24 in the comScore top 50 web properties in the US, owns eHow.com, Pluck and eNom, and has succeeded in attracting 31 million unique page views in July, 2009. Since then,...

The 21st century LMS

I recently read a report compiled by eLearning Network from their Next Generation Learning Management Event held in September, 2009. It is an interesting report. Personalization of content is a base expectation with an element of learner's control or choice over what she wants to learn coupled with added intelligence from the system to provide relevant...

e-learning 2.0 challenges for organizations

Organizations and institutions that follow the traditional system of knowledge sharing and instruction understand the limitations of this system in terms of building effective resource pools and leveraging organizational knowledge and skills. A system driven in majority by rote learning, page turners and curriculum-centricity rather than focusing on the learner and growth through harnessing collective...

The strategic inflection point

Only the paranoid survive. Andrew Grove's 2003 book by the same name reflects on the strategic inflection point when something in the environment changes in a fundamental way that is not so apparent in our daily chaos of survival. Andrew writes of how a 10X change in any one force (following Porter’s classical competitive strategy...

Common Cartridge – whither SCORM

And hello! What is this IMS GLC Common Cartridge specification? http://www.imsglobal.org/commoncartridge.html Everyone seems to be backing it.  And they promise a common way to port content to all LMS platforms seamlessly. In order to deliver course content for LMS platforms, content providers find they must build, test and distribute their content for each platform. This...

A problem of plenty

An interesting discussion I had with my team yesterday triggered a lot of thoughts. We were talking about how Internet2 (the next generation 100 Gbps Internet created by Internet2, an advanced US based networking consortium led by the research and education community since 1996) had broken the light barrier for access to content. Add to...

Services for Learning

As part of SCORM, ADL teams have worked on basically how to structure and sequence content to the learner and package it for the learning management system or repositories. However what they have not woked on is a standardized set of learning and collaboration services for SCORM compliant content to come alive. In the Web...

Frameworks for Learning

So everything that we formalize needs a frame of reference. The design of these frameworks and models typically defines the boundaries of what can be achieved. Take for example, ADL's SCORM. Written by experts across industry and standards organizations, SCORM defines a methodology to design and serve learning content. Take a look at the work...