@SUZIE: Suzie, I’m going crazy waiting for your book to arrive. If the ideas in it are of the calibre of the ideas in your comment, I’m in for quite a bit of inspiration. But you have inspired me so much already since our interview last summer. I’ll stop there, because your comment speaks for itself. Social entrepreneurialism is something I’m going to have to remember when I teach a similar class next year. Beautiful idea.

@DIANE: I didn’t mean to suggest that all who chose not to take the students into their network had issues with human relationships with them. I totally respect anybody’s decisions regarding how they design their own (adult) PLN. It was a few comments from people who specifically acknowledged they had issues with it that I found interesting.

Again (and Dean talks about this in an upcoming podcast) - this networked learning must be natural for it to work. And that means relationships have to form out of shared interest.

As for the reciprocity and inclusion of the edu-Twitterverse (ug), it’s an interesting issue - and really just a variation of the good-old-boy/girl network of the blogosphere, isn’t it? Which is itself an extension of the cliques of the office or schoolhouse. I don’t get it either.
But I think I’m learning that the more you give, the more connections you get.

Thanks all, for the extensions and learnings, as usual.

In the beginning, like I do in all the other classes, I tried to keep up with my homework and classwork, which turned out to be a great thing because now I know what this is all about. I was confused with the projects at first, but now I do believe that our class can add something to the ‘educational world’. I never thought of doing these type of stuff at school because school has always been.. just school; it’s all the same around the world. However, breaking the general idea of school and learning from variety of sources other than just teachers really is something different and quite interesting. Talking and asking people from the other side of the globe, chatting through skype in class…These aspects prove that there’s so much to learn “beyond school” (i wondered why you often say BEYOND school, and now i get i :))

Diane Quirk’s last blog post..Focusing on Connections

Suzie Boss’s last blog post..Enough Sugar in Your Educational Technology Diet?

@Barry: Your question, and Clay’s response, triggers a thought I keep having: the prospect that we’re providing two distinct educational experiences for different student populations, preparing them for radically different futures. Creative vs. factory. An opt-in elective experience probably isn’t the establishment’s ideal vis-a-vis student preparation—which is exactly why Clay should keep pounding gleefully away at it. Those opt-in students may be able to craft much more creative, imaginative, human-property-valuable futures than dispassionate students who remain in the routinized comfort-bubble, and there are businesses out there that crave the opt-in mentality, and more that will be started up in a few years by those same students. Of course, there are still more businesses and institutions that are scared stiff at the prospect of mold-breakers. Some would argue that the world needs both brands, both future-streams. I’m not sure I’m one of them. But there’s that pesky sticking point that keeps coming up: everything revolves around the student’s drive to learn. When it’s absent or just hiding shyly in the woods, we know coercive crashing around and noisemaking won’t do much good. Diane’s approach may be best: plant the seeds with fearless disregard for the odds.

Scott Schwister’s last blog post..twitku tuesday contest inaugural edition now open