Personal Web
From Horizon Project
2009 Short List
[edit] Time-to-Adoption: One year or Less[edit] Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
[edit] Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years[edit] Critical Challenges[edit] Key Trends |
Online publishing tools like blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and the like have become mainstream – certainly in terms of who reads them, and increasingly in terms of who writes to them. The ability to instantly publish, tag, and categorize work online, without the need to understand or even touch the underlying technologies provides a host of opportunities for faculty and students. Online publishing tools are being employed in the process of education as a means for personal and professional reflection, collaborative work, research, and the development of a public voice.
The same set of technologies is being harnessed to create highly flexible, unique personal learning environments: collections of tools individually selected to suit a learner’s style and preferences. Open source learning tools that foster personal and social forms of learning and expression, though technically unrelated, work together seamlessly without any need for complicated setup.
Another kind of personal publishing is also beginning to gain popularity, and holds promise for education as well. Collaborative authoring of novels, comics, white papers, and even textbooks is supported by websites designed for the purpose. Some have a specifically educational focus, like Flat World Knowledge (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com). WeBook (http://www.webook.com) is aimed at the general public and includes everything from children’s books to cookbooks. Most of these sites offer hardcopy publishing as well as online publishing.
[edit] Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression
- The ease of online publishing gives students a place to voice their ideas, opinions, and research.
- Personal learning environments help students organize their own work as well as manage online references and resources.
- Personal publishing sites that offer printing services make it possible to create tangible products of student work, customized and inexpensive textbooks, and more.
[edit] Examples
- The Knowledge Tree is an online journal created and authored by members of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system: http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/
- UMWblogs is a blog publishing platform for the University of Mary Washington community: http://umwblogs.org
- Eduglu is a content aggregator developed for educational use that includes a rating system: http://eduglu.learningparty.net
[edit] For Further Reading
- Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments
http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=11939&doclng=6
(Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher, and Steinn E. Sigurdarson, eLearning Papers, July 2008.) This paper discusses highly customizable toolsets for learners, along with a proposed design language model and proof of concept.
- The Evolution of Personal Publishing
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_evolution_of_personal_publ.php
(Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, December 2007.) This post traces different categories of personal publishing – blogs, social networks, and microblogs – and posits that each appeals to a different type of writer and fills a particular purpose in social publishing.
- Personal Learning Environment Diagrams
http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams
(Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, 2008.) The author has collected visual representations of various descriptions of personal learning environments, displaying them on a wiki page.
[edit] Share More Examples or Resources
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