PLENK2010 is a course which provides the learner a variety of tools to choose from in order to create their own content and define the content of the course rather than use materials provided by the facilitators. The course operates online and meetings between the students and facilitators take place via Elluminate live sessions. The course aims at creating a joined knowledge base on personal learning environments without forcing the students to take part in every single task that is not relevant to the learners - the latter have to select appropriate content for themselves.
Activity Theory in this case is applied the following way:
The subject of the course is the student or the student base, which is quite numerous. The subjects come from different countries and do not have to be necessarily university students.
The object of the course is the knowledge base that both the students and the facilitators provide.
The tools provided by the facilitators and the students are the following:
- course forum on Moodle
- Daily Newsletter
- RSS-feed
- Elluminate Live Chat (for discussion and weekly review)
- course wiki
- course blog
- students' blogs
- students' twitter accounts
- delicious bookmarks
- video
- etc.
The rules are set up by the facilitators and do not bound the subjects to the course very strictly, although they are assumed to participate with their own knowledge base. There are also dates provided for online meetings and feedback.
The community is set up by 4 facilitators, the learner base (different countries/age groups/interests, etc), and the online environment with its various tools and help.
Division of labour is divided between different parties and can be understood clearly from the website.
NIE is a course which provides the learner a lesser variety of tools from the previous course, and gives certain tasks in order to get feedback from the students. The course operates online through the course blog and the facilitators' tasks, and also a few live sessions which take place via Flashmeeting. The course aims at providing knowledge to students who in turn raise questions and analyze/criticize the topics provided by the facilitators. This is also a fully online course, similarly to the previous course.
Activity Theory in this case is applied the following way:
The subject of the course is the student or the student base, which is less numerous than the previous course's. The subjects are the students from TLU, and can be also other interested people.
The object of the course is the knowledge base that both the students and the facilitators provide.
The tools provided by the facilitators and the students are the following:
- course blog
- student's blogs
- Wikiversity page
- Doodle for scheduling
- Flashmeeting online chat
- EduFeedr for monitoring
- etc.
The rules are set up by the facilitators and do bound the subjects to the course very strictly, a few mishaps are allowed. This is quite different from PLENK.
The community is set up by 2 facilitators, the learner base (different countries/age groups/interests, etc), and the online environment with its various tools and help.
Division of labour is divided between different parties and can be understood clearly.
Main differences between the two courses are:
- the number of subjects
- the number of facilitators
- the number of tools
- rules differ in the sense of strictness
Drawbacks concerning the activity theory applied to the two courses
First it was difficult to understand how to position the courses into activity systems, but digging into the article helped me since my previous task was left undone. I think the clear system was a great help for understanding how to classify the course information into the components of the theory. I used Figure 4: Activity System for e-commerce, which was provided in the article "An activity-theory-based model to analyse Web application requirements" by Uden, L., Valderas, P. & Pastor, O. (2008).
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