Figure:Ground - PLEs and the Flexible Learning Environment

Tony Hirst

Dept of Communication and Systems, The Open University, UK

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The user context

Figure:ground

• Personal• Portable• Social• Lesson level

• Institutional• Monolithic• Private• Course level

Portable content for personal learning environments?

Content

Structure

Context

Pacing

http://openlearnigg.corank.com/

MIT, Yale and UC Berkeley

MIT Courseware for High Schools - in a Grazr Widget

MIT OCW for Schools:Nested screenscraping

Take it or leave it…

Yale OpencoursewareLasagne

Pipes involved in the mix…

• Yale OCW courses: extracts a list of courses from the main Yale OCW courses page;

• Yale OCW Courses (Syllabus): extracts the syllabus for a particular course;

• Yale OCW Courses (Class Sessions): extracts the list of sessions for a particular course;

• Yale OCW Courses (Single Class Session - Assets): extracts a list of media assets for a course;

• Yale OCW Courses (Single Class Session - Readings): extracts the list of readings for a course.

UCBerkeley YouTube Playlist Course Browser & Video Lecture

Search

For the playlist browser…

• Take one YouTube username• Extract the goodness as a feed via the Youtube

Gdata API• Take each playlist identifier and generate a URL

to the corresponding Gdata/Atom feed• Bundle together the playlist feed URLs using

OPML• (Pass each feed through a feed augmentation

pipe, if required)• Pipe into an OPML widget

For the search tool…

• Take one YouTube username

• Take one or more user search terms, as required

• Create a Gdata URL:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?q=skeletal+biology&author=ucberkeley

• Augment the search result feed items with enclosures to the corresponding video

Blogged uncourses

• Category based blog

• “Syllabus” outlined as a set of topics to be covered

• Blog posts broadly themed by week, but free to wander…

• Category and tag based feeds mean the “uncourse” is “self-disaggregating”

That’s what I’m talking about…

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Uncourse blog emergent link structure

That’s what I’m talking about…

OAI-ORE

Open Archives InitiativeObject Reuse and Exchange

Now available in Atom flavour…

That’s what I’m talking about…

Stringle – a string’n’glue learning environment

Stringle – a string’n’glue learning environment

That’s what I’m talking about…

http://ouseful.info