Monday, August 28, 2006

CLC in Wikipedia and CLC in Australia

I've been hacking up an entry in Wikipedia to document the History of personal learning environments in response to the blackboard patent and Blackboard's announcement of interest in elearning2.0. See here, in my other blog (not much there yet) for a rationale for the Wikipedia page.

I've entered CLC and one of Leigh's posts into the Wikipedia entry because I believe they are useful expressions of the web2.0 / elearning2.0 strand of PLEs.

Incidentally, I was quietly musing on why CLC had 'broken out' in Oz, rather than anywhere else. Things became a bit clearer for me while I was re-reading a post by James Falmer [Falmer 2004] yesterday evening. James starts the post with a quote:
"Online learning environments (OLEs) are now critical to teaching and learning across Australian higher education. Their influence impacts on the availability of content, the design of courses and, perhaps most pedagogically significantly, the nature of communication. The discussion board is the ubiquitous communication tool within these OLEs and hence significantly shapes the kind of communication that takes place. In light of this, the degree to which a successful community of inquiry can be facilitated through the use of discussion boards is examined and compared to the possibilities afforded by weblogs in the same role. Weblogs, it is argued, offer new opportunities in the development of social, cognitive and teacher presence online and should be considered in the development of or alongside established OLEs." (Falmer's paper at ASCILITE 2004, in Perth )

Enough for me I think, unless someone can give me a better story than this one which seems self-evident to me: Because of distance concerns, Australia has a strong tradition of online communication for education, and the Connected Learning Community is an expression of this tradition.

Comments?

References

James Farmer, Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments, http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=3 5 October 2004

James Falmer, Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments, ASCILITE 2004, Perth, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/pdf/farmer.pdf 5-8 December, 2004

1 Comments:

Blogger Sean FitzGerald said...

Eek! You've added the CLC to Wikipedia?! Now I'll really have to get cracking and do some work! :-)

Wed Aug 30, 07:49:00 AM GMT+1  

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