Nurphy

Markuos: I've recently written a couple of blog post at http://squiremorley.wordpress.com/ that are receive a bit of attention, the first was about the changing role of education and the second about Nurphy a new online service for conversations. I've decided to see if I can combine then by asking question about one on the other and seeing what happens. It's a bit of an experiment really. So, here goes.

Is the rise of the Professional Amateur Pro-Am, the increase in open educational resources (OER), personal learning environments (PLE), and greater significance of informal learning and research going to lead to a move away from an emphasis on institutional, formal learning?

As people are able to continually express their skills, abilities and achievements via social media, will formalized accreditation, with potentially out-dated assessment systems, be less relevant?

Or are formal learning and research institutions able to adapt quickly enough to the new requirements of society?

Ileane: Hi Markuos, I have some thoughts about this topic that I would like to share. It will be best if I share what I know rather than speak directly to some of your points. I assume that we are in different time zones. In terms of Universities having access to resources that is very true. I work for a non-profit publisher of high-quality technical documents that has several ties to the academic world. The organization realizes the importance of offering universities deep discounts to make sure that our documents are easily available and current for academia. I'm sure other technical publishers have special pricing and offerings for universities as well.

I don't know if you have ever heard of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (actually MIT is only one of several universities that participate in the project). It is a great program that provides self-learners free access to college level lectures, course notes and other materials. I did a post that has become very popular on my blog http://ileane.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/professor-lewin/ called Prof Walter Lewin - The Best Way to Learn College Physics. All of the link to OpenCourseWare are there. I think that access to OpenCourseWare has been a tremendous help to those that are not enrolled in a university.

I am glad that we are having this conversation on Nurphy (I thank you for introducing me to it) because I can come back and add more to the discussion later. Thanks for listening.

Markuos: Hi Ileane. Thanks for joining in the conversation. OERs are something that I'm very interested in. I've posted about Academic Earth previously, http://nevermindthepedagogy.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/academic-earth/ and have vlogged about the concept of OERs and the rise of informal learning, http://walktalktech.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/open-education/

It's an area that I need to do much more work on. It's interesting to find out other people's perspectives, and Nurphy appears as though it might be useful for this purpose. We'll have to see.

Ileane: Hi Markuos, I'll take a look at the other posts this evening. I just wanted to take a moment to give a big thumbs up to WordPress.com. We have access to this wonderful feature in the dashboard called the tag surfer. I used the tag surfer when I found your blog (I doubt if I would have found your blog on Twitter or Facebook) and of course you introduced me to Nurphy.

I also found another blog that you might be interested in through the tag surfer. The OpenFiction Blog is Stephen Carson's blog and he is External Relations Director for MIT's OpenCourseWare (which I mentioned previously). In his latest post http://tofp.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/503/ he provides statistics on usage of the free online learning service in the US and internationally that give insights to some interesting trends.

I’ll talk to you when I finish reading your posts.

Thanks - Ileane

Ileane: Markuos, I've had a look at your posts and I see that we are talking about the same things we're just using different acronyms. LOL!
We have something else in common, I have a Blogger blog and a WordPress blog. It's hard to keep up with you! But I am trying. You have lots of good stuff all over the place.

Ileane: Markous, the post I did about Prof. Walter Lewin is the top post on my blog. As a service to my readers, I am going to add the links you provided in you Academic Earth post (of course you will get all of the credit). Thanks.

Markuos: I agree with the added community features that Wordpress provides us
with. I've discovered lots of great stuff due to Wordpress.

Thanks for the Stephen Carson blog link. I'll spend a bit of time
looking over that.

Markuos: Hi Ileane

Sorry I haven't been responding. I'm hoping to have more time tomorrow
to engage more with all this good stuff you're posting. Until then ...

Ileane: Hi Markuos, have you stopped by Nurphy lately? They are making some improvements that might be worth checking out.

Markuos: Hi Ileane,

I haven't been on for a while; just finding it difficult to find time at
the moment. I've been testing out GoogleWave a little, and I'm trying to
catch up on some blog posts to reduce my 'pending list' in my Diigo
bookmarks. Also I want to test out the possibilities of using a new
tablet for notetaking with some opensource software.

What are you up to?

Ileane: I've created a few new lists on Diigo also. I hope you have time to check out some of the additions to the WordPress.com users group. We have a new group member (that makes 5 so far) and I'd like to start a discussion topic in the next week or so.

I'm also planning a post discussing Netvibes have you ever tried it?

Markuos: Hi Ileane

I haven't got much time right now, but just wanted to drop you a link
about Netvibes. I did some work using Netvibes as a hub for a learning
environment / shared community, hooking in with a Ning community. I
think Netvibes is great, and there's a lot more experimenting I'd like
to do.

Here's a post that I made:
http://nevermindthepedagogy.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/online-portals-for-learning-research-communities-and-more/

And a link to the learning (sharing) environment hub called uostech:
http://www.netvibes.com/uostech#Home

And a slidecast I made from a conference workshop presentation about
uostech:
http://www.slideshare.net/markuos/users-of-scholarship-technology-uostech-a-community-approach

Apologies for how brief this message is, I'll 'communicate' in more
detail probably after the weekend.

Best Regards

Ileane: Wow, this is great. I'm so glad I asked you. Thanks for these wonderful
links.