Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
November 13, 2002

DARE: a New Age in the Provision of Academic Information From the press release: "DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) is modernising the management of Dutch academic information by putting an infrastructure system in place and providing advanced services for the digital recording, accessing, storage and distribution of the Dutch academic output." All Dutch universities will participate in making their research output digitally accessible in an Open Archives Initiative compliant form. By Press Release, Surf Foundation, November 11, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Integrating Critical Thinking into Online Classes I was wavering on whether to include this item in today's newsletter until I got to the section on using Star Trek to introduce critical thinking skills into online learning. There's just a little bit, so if you don't like Star Trek you can still enjoy the paper. By Brent Muirhead, USDLA Journal, November 7, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Teaching Moment: a learning metaphor In a sense this is just another one of those articles that describes how great this or that class went using such and such a teaching technique. The details are unimportant. But what caught my eye was the "Unwrapped Interaction Diagram" near the end of the paper. It's worth the price of admission. So enjoy the read (the article is well written and has nice pictures), then have a look at the diagram for some real food for thought. Such as: why don't threaded discussion list designers try to map interaction like that? By Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer, and Randy Swedburg, USDLA Journal, November 7, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Study: PDAs Good for Education The idea of using PDAs in schools is reaching full hype status, with this article from wired citing a research report from SRI (aka Stanford Research). Palm gave out freebies to about 100 teachers. Then these teachers were surveyed and (surprise) they find handhelds can be used in learning. Their deep finding is that "PDAs can help in collecting data, writing papers, checking facts, synching data with desktops and laptops, and collaborating on projects." I hope they didn't spend too much money on this, um, research. Just so you know, a couple of beers at the local pub would have bought the same in-depth report from me. By Katie Dean, Wired News, November 12, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Good Models of Teaching With Technology As described on www-dev, the site "contains a list of best practices, several stories about how schools and districts are putting these practices into action, related policy information, links to supporting Web resources, and some interactive tools where you can add comments. It is intended as a professional development resource to help educators reflect on their own practice as well as learn from others about the role technology plays in the curriculum." By Various Authors, Northeast & Islands Regional Technology in Education, November, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Metadata Training Resources Members of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative community have provided access to their training materials for applying Dublin Core metadata to a number of different projects, including medical and health libraries, government librarians, and more. By Various Authors, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, November, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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