- Activity - tasks for students to undertake that provide an experience likely to lead them to the desired new understanding.
- Scenario - reason or motivation to undertake an educational activity if the learning is to be memorable and considered valuable.
- Feedback - provision for feedback that amplifies the learning from the experience, and enables students to increase their level of skill and knowledge.
- Delivery - educational design relies on appropriate delivery to reach its full potential (there is often a design tension between the practicalities of electronic production or delivery on the one hand (such as data transfer rates, file size, security, and cost) and the requirements of the learning activities on the other (for example, timely interaction, rich media content, and a desire for social communication and communal distribution).
- Context - contextual considerations include the institutional objectives of the e-learning program, the role and skills of any instructor, longevity of the resources, and cultural sensitivities. The connection between context and delivery methods is highlighted by Silverman and Casazza (2000), who note that “different systems of communication seem to be at the heart of many of the cultural and ethnic differences that affect the learning environment” (p. 42).
- Impact - can be assessed from a number of perspectives, including the way that it will affect the learner, the ramifications that it will have for the learning (and broader) community into which it will be implemented, and the environmental influence of its development and use.
Brown, A., R. and Voltz, D., B. 2005. Elements of Effective e-Learning Design. IRRODL.
Available online http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/217/300
Also noted in the text - Silverman, S. L., and Casazza, M. E. (2000). Learning and Development: Making connections to enhance teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Style only exists where there is more than one practical solution to a problem. As style changes over time it becomes fashion.
— Hughes, Rian. (2011). Culture: Ideas can be dangerous. Fiell: London. p.166
TLLM - a call to action, adopted by the Singapore Ministry of Education:
- It aims to touch the hearts and engage the minds of our learners, to prepare them for life. It reaches into the core of education - why we teach, what we teach and how we teach.
- It is about shifting the focus from “quantity” to “quality” in education. “More quality” in terms of classroom interaction, opportunities for expression, the learning of life-long skills and the building of character through innovative and effective teaching approaches and strategies.
- “Less quantity” in terms of rote-learning, repetitive tests, and following prescribed answers and set formulae. Teachers, school leaders and MOE all have important roles to play to make Teach Less, Learn More happen
In its broadest meaning, ‘self directed learning’ describes a process in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning straegies, and evaluating learning outcomes. (Knowles, 1975: 18)
— Knowles, M. (1975). Self-directed learning: a guide for learners and teachers. Association press, New York.
Chickering, A., & Gamson, Z. (1987). Seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education. AAHE Bulletin, 39:7, pp3-7.
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm
- Encourages contacts between students and faculty.
- Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
- Uses active learning techniques.
- Gives prompt feedback.
- Emphasizes time on task.
- Communicates high expectations.
- Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.
Further reading:
Chickering, Arthur and Stephen C. Ehrmann (1996), “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” AAHE Bulletin, October, pp. 3-6
http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.html
Charles Graham, Kursat Cagiltay, Byung-Ro Lim, Joni Craner, and Thomas M. Duffy “Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses” The Technology Source, March/April 2001. Available online at http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1034.
http://technologysource.org/article/seven_principles_of_effective_teaching/
Information technologies place into the hands of the consumer the capacity to become a producer of cultural objects. The line dividing the two functions increasingly is blurred. In the 1970’s, audiocassette technology enabled consumers to copy vinyl records onto cassettes that were often of higher quality than the cassettes available at a cost from the recording companies, and could do so as many times as one wished. (p.47)
— Poster, M. (2001). What’s the matter with the Internet. University of Minnesota: Minneapolis.
Source http://cyberron.blogspot.com/2009/07/snowballing-sampling-technique.html
“Establishing the sample and the sampling process in qualitative inquiry is almost often a subject of contention, and takes much more time in persuading panel members during research defense sessions. A systematic sampling process in qualitative research designs is rarely established. Often, what is used is a very arbitrary and uninformed purposive sampling technique (sample identified on purpose).
The snowballing sampling technique is a systematic non-probabilistic purposive sampling method that is very apt for qualitative research. Highly qualitative and exploratory studies call for a purposive non-probability sampling design, which is not after the representativeness of samples. A purposive non-probability sampling design relies heavily on the availability of respondents, especially those who are difficult to locate for interviews.
A snowballing sampling technique can be employed to seek out informants or respondents, who are otherwise difficult to locate and identify. The snowballing sampling method is akin to the opportunity sampling technique, the chaining sampling technique and the referral sampling technique (referred informants).
The snowballing sampling technique is most proper when the members of the target respondents are difficult to locate. A snowball is the process of accumulation of referrals as each located and interviewed informant suggests other informants whom they happen to know and locate. For Arce, it “results from one key informant being interviewed and asked for suggestions on who else might be good informants, and the next informant is chosen on the basis of this suggestion.” As an opportunity sampling technique, the informants were selected and interviewed mainly because they were located and made available for and in a particular study. David used accidental non-probability sampling technique as a derivative of the opportunity sampling technique. In accidental sampling technique, the respondents were chosen as they become available. This technique resembled that of Garson’s chain sampling method, where the aim is to “obtain a saturation of informants….to reveal common cultural understanding….in a chaining process.”
References:
Babbie, Earl. 1998. The Practice of Social Research (8th ed). Wadsworth: Thomson Learning Inc.
David, Fely P. 2002. Understanding and Doing Research: A Handbook for Beginners. Iloilo City: Central Philippine University – Social Science Research Institute.
Definitions of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) - Presentation Transcript
Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) a collection of definitions (written in English)
Prologue “ It’s not ‘your’ definition. The concept of the PLE is being developed by a loose collection of people, each of whom is informed by the other. Any particular element of that development - such as a definition - has as much of the others’ input in it as of the actual author.” Stephen Downes, URL: http://ow.ly/1IBCo
Personal learning center “ The e-learning application (…) begins to look very much like a blogging tool. It represents one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center , where content is reused and remixed according to the student’s own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications — an environment rather than a system.” Stephen Downes, URL: http://ow.ly/1IDHw
Facility “ A Personal Learning Environment is a facility for an individual to access, aggregate, configure and manipulate digital artifacts of their ongoing learning experiences.” Ron Lubensky, URL: http://ow.ly/1ICPi
Interface “ The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests (including their formal and informal learning), connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds.” Terry Anderson, URL: http://ow.ly/1ID0I
System “ Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning; managing both content and process, communicate with others in the process of learning and thereby achieve learning goals. A PLE may be composed of one or more sub-systems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services.” Mark van Harmelen, URL: http://ow.ly/1ICd1
Educational manifestation of the web “ Where the LMS is vertically integrated and institutionally centralized, the PLE is the educational manifestation of the web ’s "small pieces loosely joined.” Jonathan Mott, URL: http://ow.ly/1ICU8
Personal space/Social landscape “ A PLE is not only a personal space , which belongs to and is controlled by the learner, but is also a social landscape that offers means to connect with other personal spaces in order to leverage knowledge within open and emergent knowledge ecologies. (…)The distributed PLEs can be loosely connected to build a knowledge ecology (which) is open, distributed, diverse, emergent, self-organized, and learner-controlled.” Mohamed Amine Chatti, URL: http://ow.ly/1ICfh
Ecosystem “ An ecosystem of connected educational resources facilitated by a (large) set of tools and fueled by collaboration opportunities facilitating the consumption of content that enables an increased understanding of specific knowledge domains.” Lee Kraus, URL: http://ow.ly/1IDel
Collection of tools/Conceptual notions “ PLEs aren’t an entity, structural object or software program in the sense of a learning management system. Essentially, they are a collection of tools , brought together under the conceptual notion of openness, interoperability, and learner control. As such, they are comprised of two elements – the tools and the conceptual notions that drive how and why we select individual parts. PLEs are a concept-entity.” George Siemens, URL: http://ow.ly/1IDbF
Knowledge Network (digital & non-digital) “ My personalized learning environment is a knowledge network that includes my browser favorites, my RSS feeds, my electronic documents and so on. But it’s also non-digital and not easily captured in my browser. It includes my wife, friends and work colleagues, my tennis coach, my books, magazines and newspapers, the TV I watch, the films I see, the radio programmes that I listen to.” Clive Shepherd, URL: http://ow.ly/1IDiN
A new approach “ Yet for all the talk there was no consensus on what a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) might be. The only thing most people seemed to agree on was that it was not a software application. Instead it was more of a new approach to using technologies for learning . Underpinning a number of the discussions was the issue of what role teachers and institutions would play if learners themselves developed and controlled their own online learning environment.” Graham Attwell, URL: http://ow.ly/1IC2L
A new pattern of users’ practices “ We characterize this new pattern a Personal Learning Environment, although unlike the VLE this is primarily a pattern concerned with the practices of users in learning with diverse technologies , rather than a category of software. ” Scott Wilson et al., URL: http://ow.ly/1IDvW
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/ibuchem/definitions-of-personal-learning-environment-ple-4029277
