Techfoot

Learning 2.0 - Main

This program came to my attention through a brand new blog that I’ve just added to my aggregator. (Welcome to the blogosphere, Charlotte!) The project was designed to introduce members of the staff at the Public Library Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. PLCMC Staff members who completed all 23 activities–ranging from starting their own blogs, setting up a bloglines RSS reader and exploring Flickr mashups–received an MP3 player. (Looks like over 117 have completed the tasks and earned their MP3 players so far and over 300 have started blogs–as required by Activity #3.)

The 23 activities are distributed over 9 weeks, and each activity includes a brief overview–generally with a podcast and some text, some “discovery resources” and a specific discovery exercise. Typical explorations include:

• #18 Web-based Apps: There not just for desktops
• #17 Playing around with PBWiki
• #20 You too can YouTube
• #19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

Activity #2 provides an overview of 71/2 Habits for Self-Directed Learners.

I wonder how many W&M folks would take the challenge to participate in a similar exercise?

Mark Federman is posting an interesting series of reflections as part of a PhD seminar on “The Political Economy of Adult Education.” The reflections are in response to a paper written by Ian Baptiste and Tom Hearney titled The Political Construction of Adult Education. The paper provides a fascinating dialogue in which Baptiste and Heaney respond to a series of questions about the nature of the adult education. Baptist is Professor in Charge of the Adult Education Program at Penn State and Heaney is head of the adult education doctoral program at National Louis University.

The questions are far reaching:

1. Do you refer to yourself as “an adult educator”?
2. What are the distinctive practices, institutions, organizations, purposes and predecessors of the enterprise you call adult education?
3. Increasingly “adult learning” is being substituted for “adult education.” What do you make of this substitution?
4. If can be reasonably argued that the enterprise you described above will continue, whether or not the label “adult education” remains. Provide a rationale for continued use of the label or propose a more desirable alternative.

There’s lots in both the original paper and in Federman’s reflections that bear on some of the questions that we are addressing in various ways in this class.

Technophilia: Get a free college education online - Lifehacker

This is a large collection of links to free on-line courses, syllabi and other learning resources.

The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you’d join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.

This is an interesting compilation of on-line resources for self-education, but, Charlotte’s recent comment got me thinking about how many resources are actually getting harder to get access to as public library budgets are cut and university libraries move more materials onto electronic networks that require logins. She had a recent conversation with a librarian who claimed that the web has not democratized access to scholarly literature to the extent most people believe.

… but, in fact, has segregated it within elite communities more than ever. In the past, an unaffiliated person could probably walk into a medical or law library and use its resources for free more easily than one today can gain entry to either a bricks-and-mortor academic library without the right ID card or to its online data bases without a legit username and password.

I’m totally spoiled by having on-line access to most of the library databases and many of the full-text journals that I need. In preparing for my course I checked out and read about 30 books, but found myself almost always avoiding journals unless they were available on line or if I had copies of the articles in my files.