All posts by Matt Crosslin

Project Home Page

The goal of this website is to demonstrate a Technology-Based Learning Environment of the future. The system modeled here is an example of a networking learning system that connects Personal Learning Environments together into a Personal Learning Network. We have created several open courses to demonstrate the potential of student-centered learning and social constructivism. A link to each course can be found on the right.

At the top of this page you will find some examples of aggregation pages that pull content from across the courses into one place. These can be useful for highlighting the work of individual students, faculty publications, specific courses, or even school-wide organizations. These are just a few examples that are based on the work of students in courses. The system we model here can be used for many other purposes, such as faculty profile pages, student e-portfolios, department news pages, social spaces for campus organizations, and really any other way that schools currently use websites.

The bar on the left side of the page contains links to more information about the design of this site, as well as links to the organizations that are currently working on this system in order to bring the future of technology-based learning into the present.

Complete List of Tags From Across The Network

Another way to bring community together is to create a system that bring tags together from across the community. This could allow users to connect with people or organizations that have similar interests, both academically and personally.

We have created a site-wide tags and category cloud that pulls all tags from every site on the installation into one page:

Global Tag Cloud

This is a work in progress, but the idea is to create other avenues for community building through the website.

Community Hubs For Instructors and Students

Community Hub Sites are sites that connect content from across the whole network into their own area around a specific theme. We have created one for our prototype:

PLN Community

A Domain of One’s One project has also created several examples. Here are a few examples:

Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative

Domain of One’s Own Community

UMW Clubs and Organizations

The Bullet (student publication)

The general idea is that any type of student or faculty group can create a common online area and then populate their area with content from multiple users. This would be in addition to courses that are created on the system and the personal portfolios that the students, staff, and faculty also own.