Wow. What a week!!
I wanted to start off by saying a big ‘thanks for being awesome’
to all who participated in this week’s meeting via piratepad. We came
out with some great ideas and lots of inspiration – more on that below.

THIS WEEK’S TOPIC
So we are full steam ahead into WK 4 – Knowledge Building. Because Knowledge Forum (the technology that supports the pedagogy) is not open (at least not yet!) Stian has also included a short demo video you can catch here. Also, like we did back in Wk 1, we’ll be posting optional question and activity prompts on the WK 4 page, to help guide blog posts or comments.

BLOG POSTS & COURSE ACTIVITY
Martin’s expression of ‘culture shock’ (reading pdf’s with nothing but text text and more text!) inspired Nate to suggest the creation of infographics as a useful way to help us reflect on course readings and explain important elements of CSCL. Nate walked the talk and created a very cool interactive chatlog that maps out our latest (Wk3) piratepad chat. Joe posted some ideas/resources that might be useful for building onto Nate’s work on the Wk 3 page.
*For all the #csclintro followers, check out the course Netvibes page which shows all comments, blog posts and tweets related to the course.

RESOURCES
A little bit of a buffet going on here — there were a number of difference programs, sites, events, etc. that came up over various conversations this week. Peruse if you like.

• Slashdot – a news site for (techi/science) geeks.
• OpenAtrium - a group collaboration tool/enviro
• International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) – this year’s conference is in Hong Kong, July 4th-8th. This conference is organized in part by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), which also hosts a conference called the International Conference on the Learning Sciences -(ICLS). These two conferences, ICSL and CSCL, switch back and forth every year. So, last year ICLS was held in Chicago. This year CSCL is in Hong Kong. Next year ICLS will be held in Sydney (official call for papers in November)
• Dear Edupunk – short blog post for your reading pleasure
• Gravpad – a short proposal on extending collaborative functionalities of piratepad.

WHERE WE’RE HEADED
So, we had a great meeting this week on piratepad, and have come out with a couple of new goals for the course and tasks for the week ahead.

• Manifesto – Marcy suggested the idea of collaboratively producing a short manifesto that outlines principles of practice for free and open education, and that states  our desire and commitment to learn collaboratively outside of increasingly commercialized structures of education. The principles outlined in the manifesto would be tied directly to action, that is, our ongoing work, both within this course and into the future. Visit the pad to contribute!

• Ongoing blended CSCL + Open Ed community – The question that we are now thinking about is what our ‘future action’ will look like. We are all committed to creating and sustaining a community-based platform that will allow us to continue collaborative work beyond this course, and that will help bridge the two worlds of cscl and open ed. Jennifer and Marcy have begun to outline more specific concerns and issues on the “Meta-discussion about how this group is organized” page. Please add to the discussion if you’re interested in becoming involved!
  • CSCL Food Court: As a first step to creating this extended community, and to avoid reinventing any wheels, we would like to map out where CSCL activity is going on right now on the web. What resources already exist? What tools and platforms are people using to connect with each other? Our task for this week is to begin exploring and collecting resources, links, etc., to this end.
    We’ve set up a new page on the course site for this: CSCL Food Court. Please post your findings here!

So, to recap things to do for this week:

• Read the weekly articles and keep up the blog posts (optional prompt questions will be added to the Wk 4 page!)
• Contribute to the #csclintro manifesto
• Contribute to the CSCL Food Court page
• Make your own infographic (we could build a gallery if we come up with a few)

Thanks again everyone for a wonderfully productive week!