PLE LMS RSS -- Lots of acronyms here

A personal learning environment consists of Web 2.0 tools utilized by a student to enhance their learning. In essence, it provides tools for tracking one's progress, setting goals, collaborating with fellow students and interacting with an instructor. It is flexible and suits the needs of the student/learner rather than the directives of the institution or professor.

This contrasts with learning management systems, which are designed to assist instructors and institutions in simplifying many of the logistical things associated with instruction, such as assessment, assignment tracking, and grade management. Where PLEs are flexible and individualized, LMSes are generally rigid in design and structure. PLEs are often made up of open-source and freely available software and services, whereas LMSes tend to suck more resources from the institution and, as a result, seem to languish as other more agile technologies flourish and evolve.

RSS stands for real simple syndication. It is an XML schema that is used to present information from frequently updated sites in a standard format that can be read by a feed-reader -- a program designed to process the data in an RSS feed and present it to the end user in human-readable format. A person can subscribe to multiple sites' RSS feed and then all the information can be aggregated on the user's machine without having to actually go to each site to seek out the information.

RSS feeds help make learning more efficient by aggregating headlines of topics of interest to me that I could scour frequently. Rather than having to take extra time to seek out the knowledge through searches, I can let the computer (and the people writing the feeds) do the work.

A couple of feeds I'm subscribing to:

A university professor summarizes headlines regarding educational technology from the daily news that might be relevant to educators: http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/blogger.html

I thought it would be interesting to see what emerges from the USU Instructional Psychology feed: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/ocw_itls/

I also figured WiredCampus would be a good source for getting a feel for the direction higher education is going with technology: http://chronicle.com/blog/Wired-Campus/5/rss

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The funnel of the introduction

The funnel shape of an introduction to a dissertation or research proposal represents a broad statement about a topic that then becomes increasingly focussed toward the final question of interest in the particular research proposal. Here is a possible funnel to my question of interest: Americans seem to have embedded in their collective conscience the image of the rugged individual rising to the top through sheer force of will and on their own merits or because of their lone genius. But current research suggests that lasting innovation and successful businesses result from effective collaboration of many people together rather than from solitary contributions of brilliant individuals. As a result, many organizations espouse a growing need for people in the modern workplace to be able to work in teams in order to innovate solutions to rapidly changing problems in myriad disciplines. Research from the last decade or so has shed new light on the attributes of group creativity an...
Read more

Literature review

I met with Dr. Gibbons to talk about some approaches to my question. He suggested some readings for me to peruse. I narrowed down my question a bit after some of my reading. I need to finalize a question, but I'm feeling more confident in the direction.
Read more

Behaviorism and "Cool Hand Luke"

In the movie "Cool Hand Luke," Paul Newman, as the title character, has a tendency toward antisocial activities. At the beginning of the movie, he is arrested and put in jail for cutting off the tops of parking meters with a pipe cutter. (An act that had no discernible motive.) Throughout the movie we see him doing a variety of things that run counter to what might be accepted as normal or expected behavior, even for a miscreant. At one point, the warden (an apparent behaviorist who is pulling out his last card) puts Luke in solitary confinement. After his time in solitary, Luke becomes a poster-boy for obedient, reformed prisoners. The warden seems to relish having tamed Luke. But, the other prisoners seem to watch him with a sense of disappointment at his subservience and at his broken spirit. That is, until Luke absconds with the water truck and escapes from the warden while the prisoners are all performing some community service. I reflected on this movie as I read about ...
Read more