Follow-up on Networked Learning Conference Presentation

Following the presentation of our paper to the Networked Learning Conference 2010, George Siemens has invited us to discuss this further in an Elluminate session, this Friday – July 2nd 11:00 in Toronto - 16:00 in the UK. These are the details of the paper and a bit of background: Title: The Ideals and Reality of [...]

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Syntax as a Critical Literacy

Week 4 Syntax: in the Critical Literacies course The ability to recognize and use forms, grammars, patterns and other structural properties of communication. This would include information literacy and ontology of information An interesting presentation on this by Jen Hughes and Graham Attwell, which Graham makes a blog post about.  Also a very creative presentation [...]

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Pragmatics as a Critical Literacy

Week 3 of the Critical Literacies course bears the title Pragmatics which is described in Moodle as follows: The capacity to use communicative elements in actions, or to take actions using communication, to express, commit, interrogate, and engage in interactions. Including being active participants in the world and on the Web versus passive consumers. Having [...]

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The Critical Literacies Divide

It’s not good to take 10 days out of the middle of a course – especially if you travel to the other side of the world and enter what feels like ‘a different universe’. Or maybe it is good –  as a reality check – for keeping grounded. This photo – which I took last [...]

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Complexity and critical literacies

Is a critical literacy for networked learning to know something about Complexity Theory? Dave Snowden was today’s speaker on the Critical Literacies open online course, talking about complexity. We had technical difficulties and had to move from ‘Open Meetings’ to ‘Elluminate’ (many thanks to Carmen) and when we finally got going it all seemed like a [...]

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Uncertainty and learning

This week the Critical Literacies course bears the title ‘Change’ and Stephen has made a great post about ‘Patterns of Change’. Whilst a lot of this was not new to me (down to having a science background), I was really impressed by the lucidity with which the information was presented. I have had a good [...]

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Cognition

This is the subject of Week 1 (which has already whizzed by) of the Critical Literacies online open course. In the course materials on Moodle, cognition is described as: The capacity to infer, or detect faulty inferences, to use communicative elements in order to describe, argue, explain or define. Including the power of reflection, authority [...]

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Where do you put your attention?

In thinking about why I am attending this Critical Literacies course, at a time when I should probably be focussing elsewhere, I realised that one reason is that I would like to know more about how to manage learning in an online networked environment. Sometimes, it hits me hard that I am seriously short of [...]

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Wayfinding as a critical literacy

Heli’s first week reflections and Mike’s response to these have reminded me of the work of Darken & Sibert on wayfinding in virtual worlds, which I came across a few years ago when I was trying to learn more about why people might drop out of an online course. Darken, R.P. and Silbert, J.L. (2008) [...]

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Critical Literacy – a personal perspective

Like Ken I need to sort out where discussion is going to focus in this course and what type of literacy we will be talking about. Traditionally literacy has been thought of in terms of reading, writing, speaking and listening – at least this is in the UK where the National Curriculum for schools includes [...]

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