Free Range Learning

Here's an interesting post on a blog I've recently discovered, called Monday Dots . The guy ( Jeff Monday ) responsible for the blog believes that anything can be explained by using dots . He also is interested in educational technology and has created a video (using dots, of course) about a new learning paradigm — student generated content.

The jist of the video (it's a bit of a long one — just over eleven minutes) is that it's easy for professors to feel overwhelmed by the …

Threshold Magazine (which is part of Cable in the Classroom) has a recent issue out that is devoted to new media literacies and learning in a participatory culture. Much of it was written in conjunction with the New Media Literacies Project at MIT, which is Henry Jenkins' old haunt. While the articles are focused primarily on the K-12 context, they're pertinent to higher ed as well.

A previous issue of this same journal has a number of interesting pieces related to learning online.

Storytelling, the backbone of so many world cultures (as well as Scripture), is alive and well thanks to new technology: the internet.

The internet, and more specifically Web 2.0 technologies, has opened up collaborative storytelling that is limited only by the number of collaborators. In Educause Review , Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine discuss how Web 2.0 technologies make it easy and accessible for nearly anyone to blog, comment, review, teach and learn together. The stories that are told are …

A List Apart has a lovely article which advocates for a framework which imagines the building of web sites as social cartography and an action of collective memory. Link.

- Ryan Torma

Campus Technology has an interesting article today The Evolution of Digital Learning Systems through Customization.

The changes and challenges that new technology has brought to teaching and learning are well documented. New technology has changed how people receive, understand, and apply new information and ultimately has changed student expectations and thinking skills. Educators often refer to 21st Century thinking skills, technology skills, and knowledge skills to describe both the current changes …

Here's an excellent article in the online journal Innovate that lays out some of the implications of social software for pedagogical innovation :

Eventually, teachers and administrators will have difficulty defending traditional pedagogies from the challenge of new perspectives toward learning. We believe that the concept of Pedagogy 2.0, inspired and underpinned by the knowledge-creation metaphor of learning and the theory of connectivism, signals a movement away from a teacher-centric pedagogy …

Check out this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking about the need to transform educational systems into places that foster imagination and creativity in all students.

See also his presentation at TED a couple of years ago. Link

- Ryan Torma

Are traditional watermelons to large for your small grocery store? Rather than not sell watermelon, see if you can get it to grow in a shape that does fit. Link to story on hardknoxlife .

I think this is a great lesson in creativity - just because it hasn't been done, doesn't mean it can't be. This also had me thinking about distributed learning and the exiting things that we can now do. Who says you have to live in Minnesota to be a Luther Seminary student? With online learning you don't have …

Thanks to Terri Elton for sending the link to this YouTube video on the lives of students.