I think that activities like just three words can have different purposes at different stages within a learning community (informal or formal). Initial icebreaker, community temperature taker, re-energizer, quick summarizer, etc. I guess the key point is that it is low threshold in terms of engagement for any purpose.
Nick Noakes
Posts made by Nick Noakes
Jay
What's made you put informal and formal learning as a bipolar construct?
I do not see them this way, especially when I look at my own learning trajectory.
In fact, Id' be curious to see how people classify the following example:
I've just finished co-teaching a course on Preparing for an Academic Career... the key outcome of this was to help PhD's and Postdocs make a more informed choice about a career in academia vs the corporate world. The course was face-to-face but like a lot of courses these days, we used a course management system to support/extend it.
One of the things I did was to bookmark sites in del.icio.us with the course code and then using Alan Levine's Feed2JS script, had this show up as a webpage inside the course management system. The links that I added with the course code tag came from my rss subscriptions, email listservs and a few Google searches. The students used these a lot even though I wasn't asking them to check specific links out. I found out about Feedblitz a week ago and have just set up a feedblitz email link on the same webpage inside the course management system, so they can sign up for email notification of updates (bypassing RSS completely right now .. although enxt time I would like to get them social bookmarking and tagging). They've already asked to continue and we have suggested meeting once a month over lunch as a small, but hopefully growing community, so we may come back to blogs, wikis, podcasts and all the other read/write web stuff later.
So how would you classify this in terms fo formal and informal? For me, it's a little but like weaving informal learning opportunites into formal learning ... but maybe this isn't the most productive perspective. Your thoughts folks?
Nick
What's made you put informal and formal learning as a bipolar construct?
I do not see them this way, especially when I look at my own learning trajectory.
In fact, Id' be curious to see how people classify the following example:
I've just finished co-teaching a course on Preparing for an Academic Career... the key outcome of this was to help PhD's and Postdocs make a more informed choice about a career in academia vs the corporate world. The course was face-to-face but like a lot of courses these days, we used a course management system to support/extend it.
One of the things I did was to bookmark sites in del.icio.us with the course code and then using Alan Levine's Feed2JS script, had this show up as a webpage inside the course management system. The links that I added with the course code tag came from my rss subscriptions, email listservs and a few Google searches. The students used these a lot even though I wasn't asking them to check specific links out. I found out about Feedblitz a week ago and have just set up a feedblitz email link on the same webpage inside the course management system, so they can sign up for email notification of updates (bypassing RSS completely right now .. although enxt time I would like to get them social bookmarking and tagging). They've already asked to continue and we have suggested meeting once a month over lunch as a small, but hopefully growing community, so we may come back to blogs, wikis, podcasts and all the other read/write web stuff later.
So how would you classify this in terms fo formal and informal? For me, it's a little but like weaving informal learning opportunites into formal learning ... but maybe this isn't the most productive perspective. Your thoughts folks?
Nick
After reading this thread it's sparked a couple of thoughts ... not sure where they lead yet but will throw them out anyway ...
- Is choice the/a key element here?
- If we have edges and thus boundaries, there is difference between the two areas. But another way of looking at this difference might be the perspective of "new opportunities for connection/creation" .. maybe this has something to do with edges/boundary areas being rich learning sites.
One more person for the campfire ... around it, not on it pls ! 
Lots of familiar faces and am looking forward to our informal learning together.
Nick
website with link to blog, flickr, etc
Lots of familiar faces and am looking forward to our informal learning together.
Nick
website with link to blog, flickr, etc
I liked them both very much. I found both types of work very beneficual for three main reasons:
- They both allowed learner choice of focus
- Having both provided balance of individual vs group/team (formed on the basis of shared/common interest)
- Peer feedback against self- and group-developed criteria at various key stages was extremely helpful (btw these assignments were graded Pass or Fail). Peers were in very different disciplines and so looked at the work from different perspectives, but at the same time with our shared experience of the MEd progam