Self regulated learning again

We were very pleased to have professor Frank Rennie with us; some of us also listened to Rennie's interesting presentation at the VKF-conference. According to the agenda he introduced issues of personalised and selfregulated learning in higher education.

As a background we have an article written by McLoughlin and Lee treating the issues of self regulated learning, web 2.0 and personal learning environments (see previous blog post). In case some haven't read I will present my interpretation here.

I have read it twice (at least) first I browsed it rather quickly and wrote a note that I was not particularly impressed and that I was quite familiar with what is written.

Next time I read the article more thoroughly and created a blog post of my reading. If anyone is interested it can be found here.

To brief you quickly, just in case you did not read the article, it treats the issue of a traditional higher education as built on control, dissemination of knowledge and reluctance to accept new ways of learning.

Furthermore, when universities do adopt information technologies these are often manifested in VLEs or LMSs. I guess that is where we have reached at the moment.

However, VLEs are predicated on the classroom metaphor and are a kind of locked in environments. As an alternative we might acknowledge students' needs and personal preferences as well as the huge amount of resources on the net. The alternative could be personal learning environments where students mash up instructor provided content with resources found on the net into a new remix that later on can be shared on the net for others to repurpose.

The article ends with some reflections on scaffolding. Firstly, how could we strike the balance between instruction and self regulated learning and secondly, what might scaffolding consist of and who might be best suited to support learners?