Edition 13 - From the Fringe
In this edition the focus is on what’s happening in teaching and learning innovation outside of, and despite, the formal structures and systems of education. Many of our contributors point to the need to create, or work within the already, changed spaces and practices of teaching and learning.
Lead writers danah boyd and Geetha Narayanan contribute challenging ideas about how to utilise spaces within and without formal structured schooling. Through creating associations previously impossible, we can begin to see possibilities for more authentic communication and strategies for supporting personal and social development which underpin liberating learning and social change.
danah’s ‘Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?’ considers teens’ online socialisation processes in mediated public spaces.
Geetha’s ‘A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness’ examines how slow schooling utilises online networks and offline spaces in new ways.
Merrolee Penman and Kaye Cheetham’s peer reviewed article describes their research into mobile/cell phone use with Occupational Therapy students of Otago Polytechnic on work placement in regional areas of New Zealand.
Mark Landy’s book review highlights George Siemens’ discussion of connectivism, another thread calling for changed practices and spaces in the web of 21st century learning. This examination of connectivism brings us back to the importance of critical pedagogy.
Wallace Galloway Hanyang University, (Ansan, Korea) explores the design and choice of multimedia technologies for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
Ewan MacIntosh, James Farmer, Brad Beach, Clint Smith, Peter Higgs, Frankie Forsyth and editor Jo Murray in ‘Open complementing closed- PLE and LMS - why, what for and how?’, bring together a range of perspectives on the use of learning management systems and personal learning environments to facilitate learning.
Janet Hawtin uses the new SoapBox platform to speak about the open source movement and Software Freedom Day.
Other new features you may have noticed in 2007 include:
- a reader community - so we can get to know each other better
- translation into a range of languages
- tagging integration eg. del.icio.us and other sharing softwares
- most popular articles.
If you have any particular sharing/tagging softwares that you’d like us to include, please provide the name in the comments feature below. There are so many to choose from we’ve just selected the ones we know.
We’re also working on podcast subscription and cloud tagging but we’re not quite there yet.
We hope you enjoy Edition 13.
