Thoughts of Richard C. Close

Edmodo - Africa Aqua Farming Project Based Learning The following YouTube is a walkthrough of course that is sort of like gaming. Unlike typical eLearning courses were all content and rules are self-contain in the lesson. This course uses my methods of the Global Learning Framework to turn making a business plan for a fish farm into a Internet search for local resources in order to build a real Fish Farm business plan. This is model and not the finished course. My gratitude to the South African NGO www.sarinessa.org for permission to use their images and content. Below is the draft of the concept course.

While doing analysis for Full Sail University graduate course it made me reflect on the 20 year in the learning business and in particular all the flaws of LMS strategies we often talked about in the back rooms. It is amazing that 15 years later how we are still living with authoritarian pedagogy of the LMS and yet there is some light in the dark tunnel with Social Learning Systems. LMSs are very basic to understand when we know were they came from and why pedagogy is something educator applies to them but they were not designed to do. Only with new LMSs like Edmodo (that in many way I would not classify as LMS.) A Ning, Mightlybell, Twitter and Tumblr are systems that manage how we learn. Facebook is a Learning System. So lets call the new bread Social Learning Systems, a place were distributive intelligence and out of the box global collaborative lives. Our first hint is that is that Social Learning Systems the learner is in control through their Personal Learning Network. They...