Mathemagenic

Few posts/links to think about:

• Research on Collaboration in Research via Seb's Open Research
• Speaking versus writing, cont'd; debating over the Internet 
• The blogging CxO

John Robb's Radio Weblog continues pointing to old posts in Yahoo! Groups: klogs: this time it is K-Log community services. Includes a collection of ideas of using K-logs as a community tool in corporate settings.

Stand Up Eight in Learning with Confidence:

An unwillingness to make public mistakes often arises from a learner's ideas about intelligence. If intelligence is believed to be a fixed asset, risk-taking holds little value ("I either get it or I don't. If I don't, I probably never will, so why risk looking like a fool?"). Conversely, if the learner believes that intelligence is a dynamic attribute that can be affected by effort, the risk of public stumbles are not as likely to hold them back from trying. This all speaks to the need to incorporate mechanisms into learning environments that will assist the learner and the teacher in discovering these preconceptions and in working to modify/correct them if necessary.

As I promised I added my PhD ideas. I want to look for the connections between KM and formal training, or as I put it - between informal and formal learning. 

This is a short-term solution as I want to write something more readable that includes recent thinking. And I would love to have link to comments with it (so far I didn't found how it could be done).

I'm scared to put it on-line: so far not so many people have commented on it. But I'm lost, I'm trying to find the right focus for my research and I need more input to make up my mind. I've already found blogging helpful, so may be this will take me further. May be not.

I hope that KM Summer School will help me as well. I'm at the stage when I have to discuss my ideas to get them clear.

Exploring recent elearningpost links:

'Besides avoiding travel, the only reason to use technology is to enhance learning' says Don Norman.

He also speaks about accretion, tuning and restructuring components of learning - I've heard about this theory, but didn't have time to go for more details. I guess I should do it now: I would like to look for connections between restructuring and knowledge creation. I think that there are some.

In another interview Don distinguishes between activity-driven and content-driven learnining. Interesting... As a trainer I used to think about learning design in terms of activities first (of course, after objectives :), and only then about content to support them. Now I'm examining my own (informal) learning: in many cases it's content-driven (e.g. reading mailists). Something to think about.

Something else, on edutainment:

The problem is this: We do not want the gaming industry to go into instruction. The gaming industry knows nothing about pedagogy and learner-centered design. But what we want to do is to capture the excitement and concentration of those into playing games. We want to that in the same way when we are learning. But we haven't made much progress in this regard.

And about on-line and classroom instructor:

First I think the classroom instructor is better than the online instructor. The major role of an instructor is to give guidance and encouragement; to be a mentor and guide. These are as much social issues as they are instructional. And being physically in the same place really helps.

There are situations where you cannot be physically together. So here we must use online instructors. Here too, we do not believe that online instruction is very good if the instructor gives a lot of reading material. We believe that the online instructor should also be a coach and a mentor. This can work well, but the tools that we have available today are not very good. So, I feel that although online instruction is essential in online courses, it is still better to meet your instructor in person.

Knowledge Streams (Yahoo! Groups: klogs via John Robb's Radio Weblog) provides a good desription of using RSS subscriptions in a corporate settings (more than blogging). Something to come back later.