By Stephen Downes
August 4, 2003
Edu_RSS MERLOT Continuing
Coverage
Today is one of the busiest days of the
year in online learning; this newsletter is packed with
great content (and I saved some stuff for tomorrow).
Speaking of packing, I am about to get on an airplane and
fly to Vancouver for the MERLOT
Conference. So I want to get some business out of the
way before I go.
With all the activity in this field, it's pretty hard to be
the first at anything. It's even harder to know when you've
been first. That said, I'm making my pitch today for a Hat Trick of world firsts. Yup, three
innovations, each of which is - so far as I can tell - a
world first. Now I may be wrong, but it's a risk I'm
willing to take.
The first of these is this link. Edu_RSS MERLOT Continuing
Coverage is live coverage of the upcoming MERLOT
conference. This page collects comments about the MERLOT
2003 conference written by individual webloggers and posted
to their own weblogs. The RSS files of those weblogs are
collected by Edu_RSS, searched for relevant content, and
displayed here as an HTML file. The system is completely
automatic; I can just turn it on and forget about it. Have
a look, and if you're interested, follow the conference
blogs. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
HTML RSS Viewer
My second
candidate for immortaliy is a follow-up from my "How to
Create An RSS Feed..." paper I wrote last week. One of the
problems with RSS is that you need a viewer - or web server
software - in order to read it. I have written an RSS
viewer you can use with your browser; it is written
completely in Javascript, HTML, RSS and XSLT. Now because
of browser security issues, it must be run on your own
computer, not a website. And you have to use Internet
Explorer; Mozilla's security provisions are too strict. For
those who are following the SCORM debates, the RSS viewer
instantiates the exact issue SCORM designers are facing:
how to merge content from multiple sources on a single
browser. My tool is no solution to the issue (not for a
lack of trying), but at least it works. And if you have a
solution that lets my code work on the web, send it to me!
By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Edu_RSS Chat
The third thing I
would like to show you today is the Edu_RSS Chat. This is a
system that takes recent posts aggregated by Edu_RSS and
puts them into a synchronous online chat. Visitors to the
chat room can then read the post together and discuss it
online. The chat system then takes the comments and stores
them back in Edu_RSS as metadata describing the original
post. This metadata is revealed when you do a search on
Edu_RSS. The post selection mechanism isn't working
perfectly yet (it is supposed to show current posts, but is
stuck back in July), but hey, this qualifies as a world
first, doesn't it? So what do you think: is it a Hat Trick?
By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Conformance Programmes Gather
Momentum
I honestly think that the drive toward
"trusted agencies bestowing the Official Stamp of Approval
on e-learning products" is misguided. Partially, this is
for reasons of cost - "Getting a certificate costs vendors
$35,000 (or a much more reasonable $3,500 if they are
already a SIF member), plus $5,000 ($1,150) for an annual
renewal or a recertification for a new version of the same
product" - but also because such an approach demonstrates a
fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works. Imagine
what would have happened were web pages required to be
certified, and were browsers to connect only with certified
web pages. Standards certification is just a short cut for
lazy programming: you don't write the error checks into
your software, and trust some external agency that all is
OK. Certification programs are undemocratic, they prohibit
the participation of free or open source software, they
stifle innovation, and they generally restrict us all to
the middle of the road. That's not how the web was built!
By Scott Wilson, CETIS, August 1, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Copyright in Education
Just as I
had hoped, the good folks at Web Tools Newsletter have
followed up last week's discussion of copyright with a
comprehensive set of links and discussion looking at a wide
range of issues. In particular, they provide some good
resources related to the nature of copyright, guidelines
for educators, institutions, libraries, and distance
education, and a selection of problems and solutions. By
Graeme Daniel and Kevin Cox, Web Tools Newsletter, August
4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Educators Turn to Games for
Help
Wired News taps into the future of learning
as it described and links to a number of initiatives using
games in learning. Of note: according to the article, "The
developers behind popular commercial game Neverwinter
Nights made their design tools available to anyone." Also,
worthy of mention is this contrast between game design and
learning design, which I talked about last week. "People
will object to games that have a variety of choices because
they can't limit the choices their children make," Gee
said. "However, if you remove that type of ambiguity,
you've removed any sense of morality from the game because
there are no consequences to bad decisions." Yes. Exactly.
By Brad King, Wired News, August 2, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Context Referral for Authentic
Assessment
This is an interesting paper with an
important point. The idea is that instructors can take
electronic notes about student activities as they occur.
For example, "Mr. Jackson notes that Tamara is taking notes
on the group’s activity but is primarily just observing her
group partners do the work. He writes a brief reminder
(“observer/scribe”) on his PDA alongside Tamara’s name and
encourages her to work with other peers..." Now that may
not seem like much, but it instantiates an important point:
valuable data is created by context, by use. This is true
not only of students but of entities generally. Mr.
Jackson's PDA comments may end up on Tamara's records - or
they may end up as valuable metadata for the description
and retrieval of the content object Tamara was using. By
Umer Farooq, Mark K. Singley and Richard B. Lam, Learning
Technology, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Dispute Exposes Bitter Power Struggle Behind
Web Logs
Dave Winer calls this summary of the
battle over RSS "incendiary", and it's not really that, but
this article doesn't pull any punches as it arrays the
issues and the players for all to see. From where I sit
(and it's a pretty good seat) the article is mostly fair
and balanced and scores well in the accuracy department. By
Paul Festa, CNET News.com, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
MT as Courseware?
The $39
alternative to six figure learning management systems,
Moveable Type is a blogging tool that could also double as
courseware. Or so this author things (and I'm inclined to
agree) as she has set up a demo media course in the
software and is preparing to move ahead. Now there's still
a way to go here, of course. But it opens up the
possibility of a student checking all of their courses
through a single-screen RSS reader. Hm? By Elizabeth Lane
Lawley, mamamusings, August 4, 2003 1:23 p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
EdNA
Online
Australians have something they can be
proud of today as EdNA unveails its lush new website. I
cannot gush enough, nor can I write enough about it in this
tiny space. So I will quote from the press release, and trust me, I will be
coming back to this topic. "The new generation EdNA Online
provides a host of new features and services including
distributed search, MyEdNA personalisation, online
community spaces for education and training groups, and web
services in XML/RSS format for EdNA Online content
including news, newsletters, noticeboards, search and
browse. The new generation EdNA Online uses flexible,
scalable technologies such as XML and RSS which rely on
structured data for maximum benefit. 'RSS is short for Rich
Site Summary - some call it really simple syndication,'
says Mr White. 'The importance is this - it enables us to
deliver the EdNA Online store of content and information,
which belongs to all Australians, to any education and
training site. This means that other websites can leverage
work already undertaken by the EdNA collaboration.'" I hope
everybody involved in national learning repository projects
take a long, close look at EdNA... and learn. By Press
Release, EdNA, August 3, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Downloaders Disregard Legal, Copyright
Issues
This is it, in a nutshell: "According to
the data from both Jupiter and Pew, Internet users hold
little regard for the legal and copyright issues
surrounding file-sharing. Jupiter's survey shows that only
17 percent of online adults say that they've cut back on
their file-sharing due to fear of legal consequences, and
the 2003 Pew survey found that 67 percent of downloaders
and 65 percent of file-sharers say they do not care if the
music is copyrighted." By Robyn Greenspan, CyberAtlas,
August, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Learning Objects: Research and Development
(R&D) Implications...
My colleague Rod Savoie
makes his mark with this thoughtful review of 2002 Flexible
Learning Leaders Peter Higgs, Sam Meredith and Tim Hand's
Technology for Sharing: - Researching Learning Objects and
Digital Rights Management. If you didn't get a chance to
read the book-length report, you should definitely read the
review, which captures the essence of it. Savoie also
offers some useful critiques. But in sum, he writes (and I
agree), "the report serves throughout as a remarkable guide
to R&D and implementation leads, full of visionary
open-ended questions and concerns found throughout the
worldwide Learning Objects discourse" By Rod Savoie, The
Knowledge Tree, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
AEIO
Gragam Hart writes, in
GlobalEd, "The Australian Government International
Education Network have recently released a new online
database containing a tremendous collection of resources.
The National Database for Research into International
Education contains details of over 2440 books, articles,
conference papers and reports on various aspects of
international education from publishers in Australia and
overseas. The database includes links to online documents
where available and links to a range of organisations and
publishers involved in international education. The
database is updated monthly and access is open to all." By
Various Authors, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Stealing vs. Copyright
Infringment
This is obvious, isn't it? "Stealing
is walking into a Art Gallery and taking a painting under
your arm and leaving. Copyright Infringement is going to a
national gallery and taking a digital photograph of a
painting, then going home and printing it for placement on
your wall." Everybody, and I mean everybody, can tell the
difference. And so long a content producers insist that the
two are the same thing, they will have no credibility at
all.
By Greg Ritter, quoting Matt Haughey, Ten Reasons Why,
August 3, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
An Essay on W3C's Design
Principles
This is a nice essay and it covers
the major aspects of the web's design principles:
simplicity, usability, device-independency, and a dozen
more. But for all that, it misses the web's most important
principles, or so it seems to me. The web is distributed,
meaning that the entire thing isn't stored on a single
computer. And it is open, in the sense that anyone can
create a web site. Without these, the rest doesn't matter.
It really doesn't. By Bert Bos, August 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
RSS Explorer
Nifty idea.
"RSSExplorer is a tool that looks for RSS feeds while you
browse. On every page you visit it looks for the
autodiscovery link. If it finds one it displays it. You can
then subscribe to the feed by clicking a button." Of
course, you still need an RSS viewer. But it's still a
great idea. By Barry Paul, Planet-Hood, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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