The week has been characterised by some preparatory work for assignments on the three MSc in e-Learning courses I am on. There is a lot to pull together, many interesting areas to explore, and readings to go back over. But I like to start such projects early, do an initial burst of activity to get some material in place, and then take a long time to reflect and refine.
I had originally been considering proposing a project in the area of avatar identity, but decided it overlapped too much with a digital artifact I created for the Digital Cultures course at http://atate.org/ai/ai/ and it would be a pity just to do more of the same.
I have been highly motivated to explore the issues of institutional VLEs (WebCT, Learn 9 and Moodle) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and things in between to support individuals with e-Portfolios of their work but offered by an institution or company (such as PebblePad). I have also been experimenting with Moodle as a VLE platform and talking about that on IDEL11 and beyond. The readings in this area are adding to the knowledge I have of the issues that must be confronted when trying to use VLEs and PLEs. And ways in which they can be more effectively used to support life long learning and asset creation by an individual. So on a suggestion of Jen Ross I looked into the material already blogged and put in discussion forums about this and realized that a lot is being said and that I have a good asset base of screen shots of my explorations and so on to start from to pull threads together. I have proposed that the final assessment for IDEL11 therefore will be in the area of PLEs and the issues surrounding their use.
I am travelling from tomorrow until mid next week, so I am putting in this report a little earlier than usual.