Thursday, December 16, 2004

Site Profile: Judy Breck's Knowledge Commons I just added this site to the EduResources Portal, classifying the site as a Primary Guideline Referatory Site and recommending the site as a First Choice for students and teachers who are trying to become acquainted with online instructional resources. I want to profile Judy Breck's work in more detail here because I believe many more such guideline sites are needed if potential users are to become actual users of online resources. Breck's visual displays of subject areas and her "connected searches" provide an invitation to learners to explore online resources. The emphasis within the Knowledge Commons is on students and the intellectual value of connectivity, i.e., of students connecting to online resources and participating in the activity of connecting. "There are three purposes of this interactive snapshot of the actual Knowledge Commons which has been forming within the internet since its inception: 1. To provide a sampling of superior quality open content nodes for learning. 2. To demonstrate ways that imbedding learning objects as nodes in an open network causes them to cluster by their meaning and thereby functionally interrelate what is known by human kind. 3. To illustrate that a student connected to the knowledge commons does so as a node, along with all other learners and learning object nodes into a grand cognitive network. Specific incidents of use of this structual network for learning spawns dynamic functional networks." What Breck is emphasizing is that students not only gain access to knowledge through the internet,  but that they become participants in the sharing of knowledge. Consult Breck's Connected Learning Tutorial (http://www.canyouhearmeyet.com/end_ignorance.html)  to explore the site; she also maintains a Connectivity Blog (http://canyouhearmeyet.blogspot.com/) called Connectivity News. Although Breck's emphasis is on K-12 teaching and resources, she does provide links to many HE repositories; her emphasis on connectivity as the linchpin of learning applies to all levels of instruction. Breck writes as an enthusiast rather than a scholar or technologist, but her voice adds a valuable dimension to the ongoing discussion about the growth and importance of open learning content. ___ JH 2:22:14 PM    COMMENT []