A Personal Learning Platform

This is an unedited auto-generated transcript from my talk today to Creative Commons Lightning Talks.

Hi everyone, it's Stephen Downes here from Casselman Ontario Canada. This presentation is for a personal learning platform and I want to advise ahead of time that I know this isn't something like expect you to buy or anything like that, it's just something I've been working on to try to explore a concept.

So you might be asking what is that concept? That concept is the idea of aggregate. Remix repurpose and feed forward. This to me is probably the best explanation of how I think we should be using open educational resources in learning.

The idea here is that open educational resources are something that we create and work with and share and communicate with rather than pre-structured academic contents. So it's a different kind of picture of learning. Here is an example of my learning process and as you can see on the right-hand side of the slide aggregate remix repurpose feed forward.

But in more detail I get content learning content from a wide range of sources blogs articles papers reports, etc. I keep a list of fields. I keep a list of things that I want to read and I bring these together I mix them up and then using that I rework them.

I repurpose them. I find patterns in them. I actually learned from them. And then I take that learning whatever it is. I apply it to courses or projects or whatever but I also feed forward the result of my learning in different ways that way I get feedback and criticism and the cycle starts again.

I have learned over many years that this isn't an incredibly effective way at least for me to learn. So the first step is aggregation aggregation as a way of bringing content in you're seeing here a screen from my grasshopper application. It's on the left-hand side or the list of feeds that I subscribe to on the right-hand side is a screen for working with that feed.

When I use the feed I bring in a specific article from the feed and here we're looking at a specific article. I can get articles from different feeds sort them by topic get them by status, whether they're fresh or stale. Different kinds of media and this is really important to emphasize.

I'm not just thinking of everybody getting the same kind of media from different places. I'm talking about all kinds of media images videos simulations live events, eight. I've interactions whatever it should be a whole bunch of different things because I'm gonna bring them in together smush them together so this is a look at the different kinds of resources that are out there for different purposes, you know, we can go very deep into the ecosystem required to make this system work, but all of this should be behind the scenes and I try to keep it behind the scenes what I'm working with my content on a regular basis.

Here's an interpretation from a group of our authors including Terry Anderson on the remix process that happens in the course of learning this way this is an example of what people did in the change 11 MOOC you see all the different sources right edgy blogs. WordPress half-post tumbler. Facebook groups digital groups twitters, etc, we're looking at many different types of sources many different types of content and the idea here is I have subscription list a list of contact.

S or places I get content from and then I look at that content as it comes in on a regular basis and I work with it working with it means repurposing for me repurposing content means writing something up but it could mean anything right it could mean any kind of blend of different kinds of media together to produce something to share, for example what I'm using grasshopper is a specific system of page command.

S and page editors in order to mix the different context and display it in different ways. Here for example is a presentation page from my website you can see the link at the bottom there on the left hand side is the slides on the right hand side is the video sometimes I include pictures.

I also use these days Google Transcript to produce an automated transcript for me here's another example, it's my daily newsletter here. I'm taking items from specific individuals and writing a commentary on each item putting links into that and then send sending it out by email. Here's what the network of people using this kind of system looks like it's not like Twitter you publish something then you blast it out to everybody no the idea here is that we share to those who are subscribing to us we collect from those we are subscribing to that's the presentation and I'll be happy to take any questions that you may have.

The first word-based versions of OL daily started in 1998, that's when the RSS was available and I started it as an email newsletter in 2001.

There are about 34,000 individual items in a lovely.

Yeah John is asking how many people are using grasshopper can anyone sign up again? I haven't really distributed grasshoppers in the answer that question is like the handful at best what I've been working on recently in this past year is a way to make it accessible to everybody using doctor so because it's a complicated application to run it runs on pearl it requires a web server and a database so what I'm doing is I'm putting it in.

An individual container that anyone can download and run on their own computer that container is available it's on github and there's a link in this presentation to the grasshopper website. I think but if if not it's GRSS hopper dot downs dot CA and I'll type that into the chat for you.

There you go.

And thank you and dearest he's put the the github link into grasshopper and and do feel free to contribute to it. I mean, I'm writing it in pearl and nobody who works in pearls. I don't have too many contributions and any ideas as well. I mean, I'm all ears I've been working on it for a long time.

I don't expect it to ever be done or commercially valuable but again it's to instantiate this idea right the this this approach to learning online, which I think is different from the traditional model of creative reason. Or share the resource, right, you know, create a you know, a learning object if you are I'm I'm talking about a much looser definition of open online contents.

It's open source.

Okay.