XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.Alan Levine has this post about Shelly Rodrigo’s Cinema class at Mesa Community College. The class site, HUM 210: Contemporary Cinema, features student blogs and furl accounts and the teacher has student use the GitWire aggregator as well. This is a great example of how to use multiple tools to build a great collaborative environment.

Jesse Wilbur writes about the promises and limitations of RDF as an organizational and descriptive schema. As he points out that, while RDF is conceptually easy it is syntactically hard and without the appropriate automated tools adoption is a hard row to hoe. I agree with jesse the the best alternative here is Web API’s.

“API’s mean that people can innovate on an interface level, even if they don’t
have serious coding chops. I’ve seen the Google API implemented in twenty
minutes. This is a more fluid way to develop; one that feels more comfortable
even if it sacrifices information richness.”

What is “fake learning?” Wesley Fryer defines it as “all about trying to control learners or learning. Real learning
is likely not completely out of control, but may be on the border of control.” He goes on to define “messy learning” as “students taking initiative and working in an environment where unexpected,
constructive learning events can happen– in fact, they are encouraged.” Messy learning, then, is about complexity, creating enough dynamic interaction between agents that new forms of interaction and behavior can develop and the overall system can evolve unexpectedly.

Clarence Fisher posts his reflections on the blogging and podcasting his students have been doing in the classroom for the past five weeks. Here is a snippet from his conclusions.

“We have learned a great amount about the power of the classroom as a studio and about the exponential learning that is possible in a network. We have explored this new medium, but we are in no way masters of it. We are beginning to understand the possibilities of genre, but we have certainly only touched upon this. These students are seeing the purpose of research, of production, scheduling, and time management. Not to mention some of them seeing the power of revision, of editing, of doing something repeatedly until it is done to their satisfaction. “