Recently in Reading Category

The rest of the Wenger book has been posted to ANGEL.  Please read 173 - 221 for next week.  That rounds out Part II on Identity.  That also means that we should take up identity next week in a pretty serious way and also that you should focus your blog posts on that same concept.  The last section is on Design.  Feel free to dig into it if you have reading time, but you will need to finish up the rest of the book in the next couple weeks either way.  Have a good weekend and I will see you on Thursday.

Hi all ... Bart Pursel from the College of Information Sciences and Technology will be in class on Thursday to talk to you a bit about virtual worlds and how they play out in a learning landscape.  Bart maintains a blog that you might want to take a look at it.  He also passed a link along to a PDF he'd like you to skim over.  It should be a fun and interesting discussion, so please try to come ready to participate.

Just in time for our visit from the master of serious games, we get to the chapters in Wenger where he starts to talk about identity.  So we have been in the community space almost exclusively so far.  A few people (Becci you know who you are) have dropped the I word into the mix, but we have really not gone after it.  So, here are Wenger's thoughts.  There are lots of ways to think about identity, so don't get tied down to this one, just try to evaluate it.  Some questions to think about (really whenever you are examining an explanation of identity): Who defines it? How is it constructed? Where does it reside? What is its relationship to the community / context?

laggard = peripheral participant?

“An obvious principle of human communication is that the transfer of ideas occurs most frequently between two individuals who are similar.”

"learning takes place not so much through the reification of a curriculum as through modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice to nonmembers" (p100).

Diffusion of Innovation and the Tipping Point - Who is Paul Revere?

As promised, here are your next readings.  I am realizing now that I should have required Wenger as a text, but here we are.  If you don't own a copy, I would suggest it, especially for those of you in the Doctoral program. 

Anyway, here is what we have on tap for this week:

Wenger Ch. 5 and Coda I.  After all this why not finish the section on Practice.  Locality is an obvious thing for us to consider as part of our community conversation around Web 2.0 tools.  Enough said.  I would pay particular attention to the Coda.  While it sounds like a little piece added at the end, Wenger lets himself go a little and there are some interesting wonderings and wanderings in this section.  Very Zen.

In response to the dystopian / utopian conversation from last week I have included a piece by Bonni Nardi and Vicki O'Day that goes straight at that issue.  They propose what they call an information ecology as a different type of metaphor for technology (it is all metaphors after all).  I think it provides a new point of view, but with some real connections to both Wenger and Pea.  It also starts with a nice connection to the classic silent film "Metropolis", so those of you who have seen it can appreciate that, and those of you that haven't can run out and rent it.  Maybe we can even arrange a special screening. 

See you on Thursday.

Here they are at last.  Sorry about the delay.

First reading is the next two chapters of Wengers book.  This includes "Learning" and "Boundary", both of which are critical to the way that we think about teaching and learning with technology.  Learning is obvious, but based on our conversation in class yesterday, and my ranting about a definition of knowledge, think about how Wenger defines learning and the implications of his definition.  The second chapter on boundary is particularly relevant in the context of our Web 2.0 world.  Things to think about in that chapter are:  What are the implications of Wenger's ideas about boundary for identity?  What are the "boundary objects" in a Web 2.0 world and how are they different or the same as those in RL?  Also in light of our conversation in class pay particular attention to pgs. 113-121 and his discussion of practice.

The second reading is a classic on technology by Everett Rogers called "Diffusion of Innovations".  This piece bears directly on the question of how schools will change or not to adapt to new technologies.  Pay particular attention to the social system aspects of diffusion as they are deeply connected to our theme of community.  You may also want to think about the parallels between learning by individuals and learning by institutions (which is another way to think about diffusion of innovation).

These two readings again provide a complementary pair about learning without an explicit focus on technology and a reading about technology without an explicit focus on technology, yet the pieces seem to speak to each other (or at least I think they do).  Happy reading and the next set of readings will be posted soon.

Cluetrain Manifesto: