Could you comment on why this is a Personal Learning Environment rather than a Shared Learning Environment? While I could see a plug-in and process that establishes a PLE I would have thought the institutional ownership of infrastructure and program would have made this a SLE. Comments on the value of PLE versus SLE?

It's about personal control. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_learning_environment for a definition and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_learning_environments for the place of Elgg in all of that. The point is that it is a space where you pull together and organise for your own benefit the people and things that help you learn, as opposed to a space that someone else organises on your behalf like a VLE (which is also a shared learning environment). I don't love the term - my PLE is much bigger than a simple toolset in a single application-  but it's a commonplace term to describe such things and the Elgg Dashboard is one of the defining examples of the genre.

how about public key infrastructure for authentication.

Even worse. Symmetric encryption is at least provably secure (up to a point which, for 6 character passwords, turns out to be 4 seconds on cheap hardware), whereas asymmetric encryption (at least SSL) not only uses crackable passphrases but relies on the complexity of finding the prime-numbers that are factors of a big number. This is not only lacking formal proof of difficulty but there has been some notable progress in shortening the time it takes which suggests that formal proof will never arrive. In fact, I strongly suspect there are agencies out there that can crack it already, but governments are notoriously secretive about such discoveries. For instance, asymmetric encryption was invented in the UK well over a decade before it was invented in the US but no one knew about it because it was an official secret, and the Nazis never knew that Enigma machines had been cracked by Turing et al for the same reason (thus also keeping his electronic computers a secret). Plus, it is computationally very very very expensive indeed, which is why it is only used for key exchange today: if we relied on it for more than exchange of symmetric passwords, our computers would crawl at a tiny fraction of their current speed.

I just made a cryptic sentence for a password. I liked it. No poetry but my own.

Forgive me for ignoring Jobs? I don't react well to stars ... feel they're a huge distraction. HeyHo. The idea of "connecting the dots" ... that's juicy!

When a thought comes clearly to mind, from the galaxy of associations arise as though a constellation, primed and beckoning. Next (left brain activity? volitional thought? launch my project so I can finish my honors cog-psyc degree and explore this!) it's as though personality comes into play. Though the mass of the galaxy has been muted and a select few have been amplified and brightened to form a constellation, I proceed to embellish the pattern of dots, giving them a more distinct form (Bear? I see no bear in the skies!) and a fuller story, a story that reflects my identity to myself, one I can with ease convey to others.

Marvellous, nae? :-)

--@bentrem

- Ben Tremblay

Interesting. I do have an "unlocked" phone. But I found Firefox by searching for frequently downloaded apps and I did download it through iTunes (app store).

Are there any docs or info on how to setup the mob app for AU ?

i got the app but authentica is failing due to username not in database. 

I've tried both myAU id and AU Moodle username. No joy. 

Help?

I'm afraid I have no idea - I haven't tried it on a production site at AU. My suspicion is that, because of our CAS authentication process which is separate from Moodle, the login might not work. It is also possible that our Moodle site has not been configured to allow it and/or that the version supported by the app is not the same as ours. I will bring this up with our Moodle developers, who certainly do have an active interest in pursuing better mobile options.