This page and its sub-pages provide some activities that will help you to understand some of the main ideas behind soft and hard technologies for learning and, hopefully, to apply them.

The main activities will be:

A live session on Wednesday, 23rd November, using Blackboard Collaborate at 13:00 EST (18:00 GMT, 10:00 PST, 11:00 MST, 19:00 CET - more timezone translations at http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20111123T13&p1=250. For details and links, go to http://change.mooc.ca/meetings.htm 

If there is a demand, there may be a further chance for conversation in real-time on Friday at a similar time.

There will be a further chance to talk about these ideas and what springs from them on Friday at 9am PST, 10am MST, 12pm EST, etc - check for updates on how to get to that at http://change.mooc.ca/meetings.htm 

Whether or not you attend the live events (or watch the recordings) I highly recommend the following activities...

Reflection

• thinking about the ways that learning technologies in our own lives make life hard: where they constrain, where they liberate, where they are burdensome

Discussion 

• exploring the ways we might build learning spaces more effectively by more actively making technologies soft or hard, as well as to be more aware of how much or little they do so we can  research the elephants in the room more effectively.

Playing 

• designing a soft technology (or two) 

Doing

• implementing a change to a technology in practice, employing principles of soft and hard technology design.

These are just recommendations. Feel free to do these in any order, omit things you don't find interesting, lurk, be a spectator, branch, connect. This is your learning, do it in the way that works best for you. If you come up with other ways to think about and learn about this, tell us about them. Share, and we all learn too.