By Stephen Downes
May 6, 2003
Public Policy, Research and Online
Learning
Comparative studies miss the purpose
and impact of e-learning. Policy that is guided via such
studies will paint a misrepresentative picture of the
field. "To the extent that we wish to improve society - and
the very concept of public policy presupposes that we do -
we must base our initiatives not on narrow and misleading
studies conducted in artificial environments, but on
modelling and analogy from similar cirucmstances in
different domains and different environments. We need to
form as clear a picture (or set of pictures) of society as
a whole as we can, and to understand the
inter-relationships between and across sectors, across
disciplines, and to form policy on that basis, rather than
on the now-illusory premise of a magical wand that will
foster universal happiness." By Stephen Downes, Stephen's
Web, May 6, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
How the Mind Makes Meaning in E-Learning,
Part I
This article has the right idea but
should have been subjected to a critical review. Writes the
author, "The human mind evolves by arranging perceptions by
means of connections. Applied to learning, this means that
it is important to understand how the mind makes
connections, at different moments in time, and to develop
tasks and learning experiences that complement the
connection patterns and preferences." So far so good. But
she then attributes this theory to Jerry Fodor, one of the
most outspoken opponents of connectionism. Perhaps the
author could arrange to read the books she cites. By Susan
Smith Nash, Xplana, April 15, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Knowledge Management in Education: Defining
the Landscape
Not what you think. This article
describes the use of knowledge management approaches for
educational administration. In one example, it proposes
tracking disciplinary incidents according to student,
class, race, time of day, and so on, in order to identify
likely causes (in the example, a poorly trained teacher).
According to one commentator, "Knowledge Management in
Education supplies us with a framework for understanding
how good assessment practice, in fact, depends on effective
information management." Even ignoring the rampant
disregard for privacy that such an approach entails, and
even ignoring the liklihood that it will trace causes to
observable surface characteristics (like race), such an
approach will fail because it misrepresents the relation
between knowledge and data. If you are tasked with
enforcing discipline in an environment where some sort of
knowledge management tool is required to understand (let
alone identify) the cases where discipline is required,
then you are faced with a structural dysfunctionality that
no amount of data is going to correct. By Lisa A. Petrides
and Thad R. Nodine, Institute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education, March, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Big Picture, Wider-Fi, 802.everything,
Manhattan WiFi, etc.
Forget the sceptics.
Wireless is here to stay - and it won't be what you expect.
"There was a long list of reasons ten years ago for why the
Web would never turn into something serious -- certainly
not into something that could be used for secure business
transactions. The same list of shortcomings is being
attributed to WiFi today – security, scalability,
reliability, business model, etc. Just like the Web, WiFi
is grass roots, standards based, and very decentralized.
Just like with the Web, there is no stopping WiFi from
becoming mainstream." Not what you expect? Well - consider
this, for example: a peer-to-peer global wireless network
that does not require the intervention of any sort of
internet access provider or centralized support in order to
function. Try filtering that! By John Patrick, PatrickWeb,
April 25, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
School Board: Teacher’s Personal Web Site is
Grounds For Dismissal
Let me see if I understand
this. Crude humour and scatological references are
broadcast on network televsion on programs such as South
Park. But when the same brand of material is placed on a
teacher's website, this is grounds for firing? It's not
clear that this is the case - administrators allege that
there are unnamed "other" grounds. But it looks
suspiciously like the case. There has always been a certain
degree of scrutiny regarding the morality of teachers. In
an online envrionemnt, though, this reaches a deeper, more
pervasive level. At some point we need to ask where a
teacher's employment ends and his or her privacy begins.
But we don't weem to be at the point where we are able to
ask such questions. By Staff, eSchool News, April 29, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Program Lets P2P Users Roam
Free
The only surprise here is that this
development - predicted last week in these pages - took so
long to emerge. This article describes the development of
applications that allow peer-to-peer file traders to
disguise their online transactions. This makes it
significantly more difficult for people looking at their
online access to detect the exchange of material the music
industry doesn't like. The article explains, "Free software
called PeerGuardian creates a personal firewall that blocks
the IP addresses of snoops. They can see the names of files
being traded, but they can't download the file to tell
whether it's a copyrighted file." By Brad King, Wired
News, May 6, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Web Search: How The Web Has Changed
Information Retrieval
The author makes a good
point. "Web pages make poor hosts for topical metadata. The
cost and effort of adding topical metadata to an
information structure is only recouped if that information
structure persists in time with a predictable structure,
identity and contents." But he then draws a terrible
inference. "The legacy technical and social environments
supporting IR in document databases are sketched above. It
is possible to re-create this environment on the Web behind
passwords in venues such as intranets, enterprise
computing, and digital libraries." In other words, the way
to make keyword search work on the web is to close the web.
Eek! By Terrence A. Brooks , Information Research, April,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Cultural Globalization Is Not
Americanization
We don't hear a lot about world
free trade and education. It could be because, as some suggest, "The whole idea of
Transnational Ed has a not-so-vaguely colonialist dimension
to it. In the context of the WTO and GATS, there will be
net exporters and net importers of Higher Education
services. It is not difficult to guess which nations will
line up on which side of that divide." On the other hand,
we have people like the author of this article who argues
that world free trade will not have as a result the
globalization of American culture. I'm afraid I don't
agree. For one thing, culture is broader than the arts and
crafts depicted in the article. For another, even though
culture may be produced globally, it is still evaluated and
commercialized through western (not exclusively American)
eyes and values. And finally, what results might not be the
original culture but rather something which, like McDonalds
McAfrica burger or Disney's Alladin, is a hollow sham of
the original tradition. A culture survives through its
education, and when its education is imported, something
dies. By Philippe Legrain, Chronicle of Higher Education,
May 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Teachers and Scholars and Their Fragile
Digital Objects
Discussion of the preservation
of New-Model scholarship, mentioned a few days ago in
OLDaily. The author points out that the creator has a
certain responsibility to posterity. "Yet we all [know]
what it's like to stumble across these pages on the
Internet, and not really be sure whose they are or where
they came from. You can guess it is a document for a class,
but it is not clearly labeled; sometimes not even the name
of the author is clear, much less the date of the document,
its purpose, its intended audience." Well, let's not go
overboard. I give my items a title, an authorship, and a
date. That should be enough, shouldn't it? By Laura Gibbs,
Xplana, May 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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