In the last few months I’ve had conversations with colleagues and reading about “the web we lost - how the potential of developments in the noughties for loosely coupled decentralised, distributed, personal, easily mashable and re-mixable open systems seems to be fading away.
“The web as an open platform for creative expression and unfettered communication is slowly being eroded and replaced by gilded cages. As the services we champion make it more difficult to move content into and out of, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create connections between people and ideas in open online spaces” ~ @michael_rowe Without anyones permission: The open web and online learning
I remember how Connectivism and Connective Knowledge connected and aggregated participants own resources and learning networks using RSS feeds and hashtags - a cornucopia of “ any other service on the internet – Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, anything! use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.”
I have concerns about the gravitational pull of tightly integrated managed learning systems and had been talking with colleagues about going “back to the future” with decentralised, distributed personal resources loosely connected with hashtags - the idea of a dMOOC had come to mind .. where the D stands for Deconstructed, Distributed, Decentralised and most of all DIY!
I co-founded inspireNshare and the Free Education Project to promote DIY, creative and personal approaches to education. At the heart of the inspireNshare philosophy is the quote from Einstein ““Creativity is contagious, pass it on” and the power of networks to connect people and ideas.
#Blimage is creative, simple, personal, decentralised and distributed and loosely coupled with a hashtag - a perfect topic for my first blog post for inspireNshare and hopefully #Blimage is the first sign of a new wave in education.
About #Blimage
#Blimage started on July 17th as a game between Amy Burval and Steve Wheeler
Steve Responded with the Blog Post “Off The Rails” and the hashtag #Blimage - from this point it spread and grew through the network.
Amy explains #Blimage in her Youtube Video #blimage while Steve aggregates the current status and information on #Blimage in his blog post The #blimage list where he writes “The challenge is this: Send an image to friends in your personal learning network and ask them to write a learning related blog post about it. They then challenge their friends with an image of their choice. All the posts are labelled with the hashtag #blimage (blog-image) so they can be easily discovered and aggregated”
In the spirit of #Blimage I pass on the image below to you to write your own learning related blog post about it!
(Image by Virginia King)
Martin King - Sunday 26th June 2015
