KMi Seminars
The Students Own Education
This event took place on Monday 05 June 2006 at 15:30

 
Stephen Downes Institute for Information Technology, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

In today's online learning experience, the connections and content a student creates when taking a course can disappear at the end of the semester as access to the learning management system is terminated. A student, moreover, finds it necessary to access and create content the university's way; the institution hosts the content, and the institution defines the learning environment. This is changing. Just as students are finding alternative sources of content and community, students are also in the process of defining their own learning environment, one that transcends institutional boundaries. The concept of the personal learning environment, already in discussion and development, will not merely transform learning, it will tranfer ownership of that learning.

 
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.