KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Thursday 14 July 2011 at 14:00

 
Marco Kalz Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies of the Open University of the Netherlands

Despite promising example implementations the amount of empirical research about the use of PLE for learning is rather small. One of the reasons for this is that the concept of PLE is still fuzzy and that there is no shared research agenda for PLE research and development.

The presentation will provide a short analysis of the current state of the art of PLE research and development. The Theory of Structuration by Anthony Giddens and successive technology oriented theories will be used to define Personal Learning Environments from a structurational perspective. PLE will be discussed in the light of self-organized learning, double-loop learning and reflection about learning. In addition the PLE will be discussed as an environment to capture learning experiences from different contexts. Current research challenges will be summarized and future research directions proposed.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.