Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners
At the conference EduMedia 2008, TENCompetence Special Technology Track "Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners" I presented my ideas and gained experience with Start pages and their possibilities for building the learning and research environments for Self-organized learners. The comparative analysis of fourteen start pages is performed according to a proposed methodology. I offered a model of an environment with six channels for: authoring, syndicating information, communication, collaboration and networking, researching, and evaluation.
The prototypes of such environment are built in the Start pages Netvibes and Pageflakes. Several advanced students (2-3 from each group) participated in this experiment.
Here I propose my presentation:
It will be so interesting for me if other eLearning professionals who are thinking and researching in this area to exchange the ideas and experience. Please, if you have an opinion, observations, reservations, practice with Start pages as learning and research environments, share them or mail me.
The all papers presented at the Special Track are available at:
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-349/
It is always a pleasure to find similar-minded people with whom to share and discuss interesting ideas.
The idea of start pages has been intriguing me for a long time. I have been using Netvibes for more than a year now and similarly to the use case in the presentation I have tailored my start page to fulfill my needs in certain contexts (trips, translation tools, tech news, community and collaboration).
What I like most is the combination of RSS feeds, bookmarks and widgets in one tab (section) according to a context. It took me some time to realize that it is more effective to have on one section RSS feeds from one topic, together with the relevant bookmarks and widgets, rather than having all RSS feed, all bookmarks and all widgets on separate sections.
I have discussed similar topics in two posts in my blog as well although a bit chaotic.
Hi Mitko! Nice to meet you here and thank you for this comment!
When I prepared this experiment and
paper I used the information found via search engines and basically gathered information from blog posts and comments and I mention this in the section Used methodology. I did not find research papers about using the start pages in the learning. So, I would like to thank the bloggers and you too for sharing the good ideas!
The idea about channels is as follows: in the authoring channel, the learner (or education in the role of the learner) can arrange tools for creating/editing/sharing/publishing content; in the syndicated information channel - gather interesting and useful information; in the social networking channel - to prepare associations with other learners and experts; in the communication channel - tools for synchronous and asynchronous communications; in the research channel - tools for gathering/analyzing/visualizing information; in the evaluation channel - tools for self-assessment or for peer review. Each channel is implemented with existing components, including html and link components and widgets.
About the students, they really enjoyed designing and working with the start pages such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage and I hope that they have improved their knowledge and skills. The detailed analysis of the students’ opinion is coming.
I read your posts and I think that it is a good idea to prepare a joint paper about start pages for life long learners! :)
I experimented with start pages for PLE but opted to go to the learning landscape option with elgg.net; with elgg I have the lifelong space I need for the students with social networking, collaboration tools and theopen architecture to add functionality as required. I still need to work on linking to other social networks and to openID. I have the added secuiryt for my institution by having the system reside on our server and the artefacts and connections are not at the prey of thirdparty agencies; mine is a diferent aproach with its own limitations.
Dear Malinka, your slides are the first I came across that depict pretty well the transition between web2.0 and e-learning2.0. Congratulations!
Also, your work on using start pages for learning is quite interesting, though I prefer to stick to old-school by using my mail reader (Thunderbird) for syndication/aggregation. It is limited, but with respect to efficiency, my first choice.
Dear Malinka,
I'm also working on Personal Learning Environments and I found your presentation very interesting.
Although I agree with you about choosing Netvibes among the best start pages nowadays, I think that in the future iGoogle will be the best suited for achieving "channel integration" on the PLE. Why? because of these features:
* Canvas view support: allows the easy development of powerful full-page widgets.
* Effective data sharing: you can share a widget and, what is more important, the data within it (not only at the moment of sharing, but also after that)
* Automatic topic-related tab creation: you can ask google about a topic and it will automatically add a tab with widgets based on the topic name
* OpenSocial API support
I also think that authoring tool support is necessary, but in the sense of an XHTML editor and a content manager module. The XHTML editor will be the tool for writing the contents, while the content manager will be the tool for distributing those contents among the services of the "cloud". I have chosen eXe for adding authoring tool support to iGoogle start page because of its openness and extensibility (client/server architecture based on XUL, JavaScript and Python).
Regards,
Oskar
I forgot to say that the mentioned iGoogle features are only available, at the moment, at the Sandbox of iGoogle.
Dear Oskar, thank you for sharing your point of view. I absolutely agree that iGoogle is a suitable start page for PLE deployment. Also I think that learners with different learning styles, needs and preferences will use different start pages or other environments (as Michael said about Elgg)for PLE.