A presentation by Stephen Downes which brings together a number of different themes of an ongoing discussion about approaches to and tools for personal learning. Play the audio and click along through his embedded slides (closely tied to the audio so you'll know when to click - and don't be daunted by 62 slides, they're not verbose). He begins by discussing an imperative of learning: in the absence of simple causes and effects, to make sense of masses of seemingly chaotic information and create new circumstances. He then proceeds to talk about the aims of learning and differentiate these from the apprehension of content. After introducing some of his adventures with technology, he ends:
"The idea here ... is to create networks of interactions, to aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward content from our very desktop, from our very own computers, to each other around the internet, to create a personal learning centre, rather than something that is owned by Google or something that is owned by a university or a college. The idea here is we have a diverse network with multiple views, multiple perspectives, multiple technologies, and these different technologies are connected and interactive, they are not integrated into a single whole. They are, as David Weinberger said, small pieces loosely joined. The idea is that this network is open - it's not a closed system - it is an open network of sharing from one information provider to another information provider."