OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
May 28, 2003

New Brunswick: Our Stories, Our People
About the place I call home... By Heritage Branch, Province of New Brunswick, May, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Student Publishing & Privacy, Take ... Oh Whatever
A nice discussion of privacy and student publishing has been bouncing back and forth for the last week or so. This page lists the major contributions to the discussion - click on the links from the bottom up. The issue, essentially, is this: if students publish work online, using, say, a blog, and if that work is evaluated, how much of this should be publicly accessible? The concern is, of course, that a student's privacy might be violated, and that student's should be protected from the harsh criticism that may be delivered from the world at large. I have always sought to do my work publicly - from public speaking, class newspapers and bulletin board projects in grade school to student journalism and activism in univresity. Trust me, nothing teaches you to write well, to write quickly, when you know that 25,000 people will read your words the next day. But that said, I think it should be the choice of the student - and it seems to me that the same digital rights we use to manage professional works can also be employed by students to manage the public - or private - nature of their work online. By Greg Ritter, Ten Reasons Why, May 28, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Truth of Weblogs
Short article that makes an interesting point. Before weblogs, we had two choices: objective reporting, conducted by independent professionals, or subjective opinion, conducted by partisans or advocates. Welogs now give us a third - and arguably better - alternative: intersubjectivity, the view of the world when many subjective perspectives interact with each other. Purists - who believe that there is one truth, and that objective reporting gets at it - will not be satisfied. But for the rest of us, those of us who believe that truth depends on your point of view, intersubjectivity is a significant improvement. As David Carter-Tod recommends, follow this article with this one, which describes a theory of weblog conversations. By David Weinberger, KM World, June, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Have We Lost the 'Public' in Higher Education?
I think there is merit to this argument. In the last decade or so, argues the author, colleges and universities have been increasingly seen as vehicles through which students could obtain economic advantage. This has allowed them to raise tuitions and thereby to make them less dependent on public support - and accordingly, to become more commercial and less responsible to public interest. As a result, they - and their students - have become over the years less and less likely to engage in experimentation, activism or controversy. Like the author, I think that something is lost when this happens. By Robert Zemsky, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

TEEM
TEEM (Teachers Evaluating Educational Multimedia) is an educational software evaluation service. The site provides free access to 1110 evaluations written by teachers of 704 products. Readers can search for evaluated products according to topic area and educational level. Link via Spartacus. By Various Authors, May, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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Copyright © 2003 Stephen Downes
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