ple

Personal Learning Environment

paulo-duarte — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:10:23 GMT

Depois de uma discussão sobre jogos e avaliação no ensino propomos uma reflexão sobre a utilização das tecnologias (de um modo geral) na aprendizagem do aluno.

Este vídeo que vos trazemos é de uma aluna do 7º ano de escolaridade e parece-nos extremamente interessante a utilização que faz das tecnologias, no entanto deixa-nos algumas questões.

Em que medida a utilização das tecnologias influência as estruturas cognitivas das nossas crianças e jovens? Da vossa experiência e leituras, quais vos parecem ser as vantagens e/ou desvantagens da utilização destas ferramentas?

Por outro lado, quais as mudanças necessárias no papel do aluno em contextos de aprendizagem que envolvam a construção/dinamização de um PLE?

“Sapo Campus: promoção da utilização de serviços da Web social em contexto educativo”

saraalmeida-visit — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:10:08 GMT

Está disponível, na última edição de 2011 da Revista Educação, Formação e Tecnologias (vol. 4, n.º 2), o artigo intitulado “Sapo Campus: promoção da utilização de serviços da Web social em contexto educativo”.

Neste artigo é feita uma caraterização da plataforma Sapo Campus e são apresentados os resultados preliminares relativos à sua utilização. Estes resultados permitem-nos refletir sobre a necessidade de reforçar a dimensão social e comunicativa do Sapo Campus, através de ferramentas que permitam uma maior abertura, partilha e comunicação entre os seus membros.

O artigo está disponível online, para aceder basta clicar aqui.

Boas partilhas! J

The PLE Conference 2012 em Aveiro

carlossantos — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:23:21 GMT

Este ainda é o logo da The PLE Conference de 2011 que decorreu em Southampton. Mas a partir de hoje já é oficial, a edição de 2012 será em Aveiro.

Eu e o Luís, como temos tão pouco para fazer, decidimos ocupar o nosso tempo livre e abraçar este desafio de organizar uma nova edição desta conferência. :)

Os desafios são enormes porque o nível das edições anteriores foi muito elevado.

Vamos precisar de muita criatividade! Esperamos que muitos de vocês possam ajudar...

PLE

plage-visit — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:07:45 GMT

Tenho interesse em perceber o porquê do sapo campus ser considerado um PLE?

Se o sapo campus é um PLE, uma rede social no Ning não o será também?

Quais as características que definem o sapo.campus como sendo um PLE?

Augmented classrooms

fpais — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:51:13 GMT

No livro "Handbook of emerging technologies for learning", Simens e Tittenberger, a certa altura referem que o ensino com tecnologia pode ser enquadrado em três categorias: blended learning, online learning e augmenting classrooms. Se as duas primeiras não representaram novidade, já o mesmo não posso dizer relativamente à terceira- augmenting classrooms, pelo menos verbalizada de uma forma tão simples e tão directa.
Trata-se disto mesmo! Principalmente no contexto do ensino não superior, onde a prevalência decorre num contexto presencial, as tecnologias permitem “aumentar” a sala de aula!
Entendo este aumentar não só num espaço e num tempo, mas também numa dimensão de desenvolvimento de competências e num contexto de always learning.
Tentando materializar este conceito na prática lectiva não faltam exemplos, que podem ser indexados à tecnologia usada:
“aumentar”…

> … a reflexão dos alunos
Blogs de alunos, onde façam a reflexão crítica das suas aprendizagens, criem e partilhem os seus conteúdos;
>… o trabalho colaborativo
Wikis que acrescentam a dimensão colaborativa necessária para realizar um trabalho de grupo lançado pelo professor;
> … a partilha de recursos, seja de recursos que os alunos encontram na web seja de conteúdos que produzem.
>…

Não seria interessante que este “aumento” integrasse, de alguma forma, o PLE de cada aluno?

Ou melhor, o desafio não é esse mesmo?

Referência: Siemens, G. and P. Tittenberger (2009). Handbook of emerging technologies for learning, University of Manitoba.

Reflections about Networked Learning and PLE

martapinto — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:00:08 GMT

In Networked Learning people learn within networks as a part of them, receiving and contributing to the creation of knowledge. The Social Web and the Web2.0 tools have certainly contributed importantly to this way of learning. RSS feeds and comunicating in an online open way through blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook, and many other tools, has provided the learner with an environment within which to interact and connect, demanding a continuous exercise of autonomy and responsibility in their use to learn.

In Wendy Drexlers paper "A Networked Learning Model for Construction of Personal Learning Environments in Seventh Grade Life Science" (2010), its stated that in the 7th grade class networked learning environment the students success depended highly on their motivation and teachers strategic guidance, adding that it would "require considerable teacher professional development and possibly a philosophy different from that of most current educators".This issue is very important for me as a teacher to reflect about. It is not easy to build a PLE, or I might say it was not easy for me. I started last year (2010) in September to better understand what a PLE is, and to try and build my PLE. It was in one of the PhD class, and the tool asked for me to use was Netvibes. It was only then I truly understood the power of RSS feeds in updating me with all the content on the websites, blogs I consulted everyday or just randomly once in a while. I had used GoogleReader or Twitter to update some information, but to think I could have an open online space as a PLE was something new to me. I then began to search about PLEs in education, and soon enough I found the video 'Welcome to my PLE' with a 7th grader explaining how she built her PLE for Science class. The video is very good in showing how in the teaching practice we can integrate the PLE as a learning experience for the students, its very clear in showing how the student manages all the pages she consults for personal entertainment and school work. My first thought was that this must have been some special student achievement :)...could it be built by a 7th grader?! OK, lets have confidence on our 7th grade students :) The issue is that, it is possible! The questions are: Is it possible to apply Networked Learning in schools with large classes with students heterogeneous in the ability to use technology? My reflections take me to think that with numerous and heterogeneous classes the necessary balance demanded of the teacher between the necessary relinquish of their authority as intellectual managers and students autonomy, would be far greater and more difficult to obtain. In this type of learning its development lead to an increase of one-to-one or small group teacher facilitation, bigger classes will also have bigger difficulties to manage those supports in the frequency needed. Younger learners need more support in their learning, and the bigger the classes more computers will be used and consequently more technical support will be needed, and some frustration can lead to difficulties in students motivation towards this approach to learning.

On the other hand, a growing number of young learners outside formal education are using digital technologies, increasing their exercise for autonomy learning, autonomy to choose the tools that best suit their interests and needs to learn. This can facilitate the teachers challenge to integrate these tools in class and for the development of a PLE by students. Students are challenged to continue the learning process initiated in the classroom, and transfer that knowledge to the outside of school walls, or vice-versa, capable of developing their own PLE for all subjects of interest throughout their life, as a lifelong learner.

Estrutura inicial das estratégias

fpkanitar — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:02:59 GMT

Acabamos de disponibilizar a estrutura inicial das estratégias para a criação da UC. Estamos aguardando comentários e sugestões dos demais grupos, para que possamos articular todo o processo de criação da UC. :-)

Grupo Estratégias - Fatima Kanitar, Fatima Pais e Susana Capitão

Next Generation Learning

nunobarros — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:00:46 GMT

Designing Email - Part II

bruno-abrantes — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:56:00 GMT

So yesterday I wrote a little about the conceptual and practical challenges of adding emailing capabilities to the SAPO Campus platform. I was adding some final touches to the design proposal for the new feature, and it's pretty much done by now, so I thought I'd finally put it out there, and discuss some finer points of the design.

As email clients go, this solution is pretty much standard, so no revolutions here. I went to some length discussing this on the last post so, if you haven't read it, go do it now. It's the least you can do. The best I can do then is try to make the whole experience not suck. Part of this is still up for grabs, since I don't know yet how fast and responsive the interface will be. For now, I've focused my efforts into making it as simple and clean-cut as possible: Email in general has evolved into one hell of a gargantuan system, with lots of features most people don't really give a crap about. So my main task involved getting rid of as much feature-creep as humanly possible. I thought about the features most people use on their day-to-day emailing and put those in the front row, and hid or altogether scrapped the more obscure ones.

So yeah, here it is.

The first iterations were all designed sans colour, using only shades of gray. It's tremendously helpful to do this before slapping your colour scheme on the design, to make sure there's enough contrast and that the hierarchy and element states are properly conveyed. The image shown here is what I consider to be the "final" interface iteration.

In full-blown Technicolor®

Same deal as before, but now in full colour. Although I say "full", the interface actually uses colour (the SAPO Campus trademark greenish) very sparingly. I think this does a good job of highlighting key elements in the application without confusing and cluttering up the user experience.

Basically, the application is composed by four key elements: the toolbar, the accounts pane, the message list pane, and the message viewer pane.

The toolbar

This area exposes the main actions available to the application, from left to right: Getting new mail, Composing new mail, Replying, Replying to All, Forwarding, Deleting and Marking as Spam and, finally, Searching through your mail.

There was a lot more I could've fit in here but I decided I'd keep it simple. Only the most useful actions are available in the toolbar and, furthermore, all the buttons are contextual, meaning that some of them stay inactive (visually less opaque) until a message is selected in the message list pane. You may notice the interface is lacking several common features such as filtering options and "Mark as..." buttons. The way I see it, filtering is kind of useless if you provide an awesome search function (and yeah, that's my idea here) and marking stuff as read/favorite/whatever probably makes a lot more sense if it's done in the same place where the message is displayed.

The accounts pane

Since the client we'll be using essentially uses an IMAP connection, the folder list for a given account will be automatically populated by the folders already on the server. It's also possible to add multiple accounts, and they'll be listed hierarchically and labeled by their actual email address. The folders display the number of unread messages, and the whole accounts pane is resizable (using the small dot on the border as a drag anchor). The only thing left to solve here is adding and removing folders: I'm not yet sure if this should be directly present in the main interface or if it should be tucked away in some kind of settings view.

The message list pane

Each row on this pane is a message. You can sort messages by clicking on the list headers, and you can visually tell apart messages that are unread, carry attachments or the ones which you marked as favourites. Marking a message as a favourite or as unread (once you've read it) is as easy as clicking on the appropriate row + column combination. This ensures that marking messages as favourites/unread is cognitively linked to to the message itself, and not distant from it as would occur if the UI had a specific "Mark as..." button(s). Once more, the entire pane is resizable using the small dot below as a drag anchor.

The message viewer pane

There's little to be said about the message viewer. The interface should take a step away here and just let you read your email comfortably enough. Most email clients use disclosure triangles and such to feed you a bunch of metadata about the message. I'm waging that most people don't really care about such data (and actually get confused when seeing it) so I chose to simply make it go away. Only the utmost important interface elements remain: Subject (in bold), From, To and Date Received. There's also this tiny icon on the top right corner of the pane that lets you view your message in all of its fullscreen glory.

Composing messages

Alongside reading messages, composing and sending are at the crux of the email experience, so this screen better be really well designed. Again, the goal was to keep message composing as pain-free as possible, providing simple interface controls and a well thought-out rich text editor. Once you click the "Compose" button on the toolbar, a dialog window pops up with the compose interface. This dialog window is draggable/resizable, it's not modal (meaning you can still interact with the UI below) and it's not exclusive (so you can type out two messages at once, or keep one message you've received earlier while composing a new one).

The left column on the compose window lets you keep track of your attachments and upload new ones. Since this is isn't a desktop app (and the HTML5 drag-and-drop spec is not quite there yet) you can't just drag attachments into the message body itself, which I think is the most awesome way ever of adding attachments to a message. Uploading attachments is done by AJAX magic and never forces a reload, so I believe it's a pretty much stress-free process.

This interface also provides a toolbar, and I've tried to keep the number of buttons down to a minimum. You can basically send your message (and this button is repeated at the bottom, just in case), check spelling and save it as a draft. These last two could've been avoided, since spell checking and periodic saving of your message should be done automatically without user input once every few seconds. However, most users are, I believe, extremely distrustful of "automagic" systems, and a big fat button that users can click feels all the more safe. If the application crashes or the user closes it by mistake, she'll then be pleasantly surprised that the email client was smart enough to save her work. Phew!

Glancing at the interface, you might notice some standard fields lacking, namely "BCC" (Blind-Carbon-Copy) and "Reply-to". These are without a doubt useful features, but ones that most people don't care about. I've chosen to tuck them away in a nice little dropdown field that expands when you click a button named "Add field".

Finally, actually writing text was made as simple as possible. There's a small tabbed navigation that allows you to switch between a rich-text editor (the one turned by default, since it's the most likely option for most people) and a plain-text editor. The rich-text editor is as uncluttered as possible, providing only the most crucial text-editing features: think Bold/Italic, linking to pages, aligning text, etc.

Searching

Without complicated things such as filters and fiddly controls to allow you to find the stuff you need, you naturally turn to the search facility. While nowadays the sort of "magical" search first introduced by Amazon is pretty much standard, there are still lots of applications who still don't quite "get" it. By this I mean the application forces the user to refine her search before actually searching: there's usually this list of checkboxes that can be turned on or off and your search will be limited those fields which were selected. This is just plain nonsense, and the geniuses at Amazon knew it. People don't want to make tough choices and worry about the kind of metadata they're searching for. That's what computers are for! Search should be as easy as:

Type in query.

Found it?

No? Okay, look at some of the other results.

Maybe try applying a filter or two?

There you go, you found it!

This is the exact experience I had in mind while designing the search feature. It's dead-simple to use. You can search for whatever you want, and then filter the results later should you need to. The search is live and begins as soon as you type, so I bet you'll find that lost message in a matter of seconds.

Sweating the details

The devil is in the details, or so they say. Details can also make or break a design, so it's important that you spend a good amount of time working out the finer aspects of your application. Everyone else does the obvious stuff, so what gives your users that final push is the little things that make them smile when they notice them. I've already discussed the importance of periodically saving the user's work, but there's a few other things to consider when designing the email application.

First up is history management. Since the whole application is powered by Javascript and AJAX, users won't be able to rely normally on the back/forward buttons in their browser. Since other areas of the PLE already address this concern, it makes sense to develop a history stack for the email client as well. You'll be able to use your browser's built-in history buttons to go through your messages or to make your compose screen disappear or reappear.

The ability to undo your mistakes (ie. deleting a message) is something I normally strive to implement, but I'm not sure this will be as straightforward to do with Roundcube as if we were developing the whole application. It's something to keep in mind though.

We'll also try to make Roundcube play nice with our Notification Server so that, when using the PLE, the user doesn't need to keep checking the email page. The email icon (by the way, these are not the final icons in the screenshot above) will itself tell you how many new mails you have in your inbox, anywhere you are. In the future, advanced functionality could include message previewing using floating dialogs that are shown wherever you are in the PLE.

Finishing up

If you've read this far, then you deserve a cookie. No, really, this post kind of got out of hand. But hey, at least the mockups had a superhero theme going on! (Extra cookie if you noticed)

Ambientes Pessoais de Aprendizagem

simoes-guest — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:00:00 GMT

A propósito de Ambientes Pessoais de Aprendizagem - Personal Learning Environment- , Michele Martin, autora do blog The Bamboo Project Blog, registamos algumas ideias fortes:

"A personal learning environment is personal in the sense that WHAT is learned has to be based on what interests the learner.
...the learner should have some ability to select the tools that work best for his/her learning style and needs.
For a PLE to be successful, a person needs to know how to learn.
...there has to be an organizational culture of learning, not a culture of training.
...access to the tools of PLEs.
I see PLEs as a strategy of empowerment that allows staff to become more self-directed in their learning."

Para saber mais...

My Personal Learning Environment

Reorganizing My Personal Learning Environment

Supporting Personal Learning Environments: A Definition of a PLE

Seven Strategies for Supporting Personal Learning Environments at Work

Personal learning environments - Wikipedia