education & tech

After a long period of not being reading important info and motivated by 7 Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers I've moved back to read the more than one thousand education posts I have to read in Education from our subscriptions. One of those highly qualified educators is George Siemens, who just had to give a speech at the iTForum and he even let his pdf document used for such presentation, free for us to read it online.

This paper explores the shifting role of educators in networked learning environments, with particular emphasis on "curatorial, atelier, concierge, and networked roles" of educators, to offer learners in forming wide personal learning networks for complete understanding of these fields.

In his document called, Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers he explains what are those challenges educators confront today:

Social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, Skype, Ning) provide opportunities for learners to create, dialogue about, and disseminate information. But what becomes of the teacher? How do the practices of the educator change in networked environments, where information is readily accessible? How do we design learning when learners may adopt multiple paths and approaches to content and curriculum? How can we achieve centralized learning aims in decentralized environments?

In other of his posts George Siemens concede the advantages of work in an Open Source environment and congratulates his page it's been translated into another languages such as the Chinese. How great is it to present your work under Creative Commons that under different circumstances will be a copycat. Edu2do.com is the portal translating the contents of Elearnspace and other well recognized advocators of a change in Education. They are, OLDaily, Infinite Thinking Machine and Weblogg-ed, of course.

Technorati: george+siemens, education, itforum, chinese, creative+commons, social+networks