The results of this study demonstrate the potential for Personal Learning Environments as a tool for Lifelong Learning, linked to communities of practice. Personal Learning Environments can extend access to educational technology to everyone wanting to organise their own learning. PLEs can include and bring together all learning, including informal learning, workplace learning, learning from the home, learning driven by problem solving and learning motivated by personal interest as well as learning through engagement in formal educational programmes.

Source: Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning

In addition to a counterintuitive organizational scheme, integrated commercial systems have a built-in pedagogy, evident in the easiest-to-use, most accessible features. The focus on presentation (written documents to read), complemented by basic “discussion” input from students, is based on traditional lecture, review, and test pedagogy. This orientation is very different from the development of knowledge through a constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approach, which a number of faculty use successfully in the classroom. In constructivist pedagogy, the instructor’s role is to provide a rich learning environment, which often includes extensive social interaction, self-assessment, and independent projects. These techniques are better supported by Web 2.0 applications or by learning management systems that encourage such pedagogy at the novice level. The more a CMS promotes traditional pedagogy, the more likely it will limit faculty creativity—and flexibility and creativity are the foundations of academic freedom and good teaching.

Source: EDUCAUSE Quarterly

But for educators who are champions of new technologies, getting any kind of social media program going in schools is a serious challenge. A significant portion of districts ban even the tamest forms of social media. So just to get started, you’ll need to find ways to broach the subject without scaring off stakeholders. That means focusing on the form of social media right for your school; tying a social media program into learning objectives; and finding the right ways to break the ice with administrators, IT/technology directors, and other teachers.

Source: THE Journal

I would like to share my own experiences with a course I taught this fall in which educational social tools were used.

Source: Virtual Canuck

Educause 2007 Conference Presentation Slideshare : Empowerment by Sharing: Tools for Today’s Classroom, by Stacey Kizer

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The world wide web can be a good place to start learning a foreign language. This is a compilation of language communities, tools, and other online resources that’ll help you get started.

Source: Mashable

iAlja: What makes Twitters Tweet?

Twitter is the ultimate social network - anywhere, anytime.

To build a special connection between forum members and strengthen the forum community

Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech - If you ain’t a feed, I don’t read

If you don’t blog but have some significant ideas, learning, teaching to share, I likely may not know about your or even follow your work. Which is to say that my RSS aggregator has become the primary means by which I learn.

A recent paper by Jon Dron has stimulated my thinking about social learning from two perspectives. First is renewed appreciation for the value of a loosely knit networks as distinct learning resources and second the increasing value of learning networks (as opposed to tight, class or institutional bounded communities of practice) in both formal and informal learning.

Source: Virtual Canuck