By Stephen Downes
August 18, 2003
Budding Buddy Business
This trend
is already evident in the world of venture capital and it
is likely to storm to the forefront in education as well:
"Venture capitalists are opening up their wallets with
caution to hot 'social networking' start-ups, or those
companies that help you connect with friends to help get
ahead in romance or work." What will people look for in
education? Someone who will tecah them, of course. By Matt
Marshall, San Jose Mercury News, August 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Online Learning a Virtual
Revolution
"I have to have a piece of chalk in
my hand to make any sense, the way Thomas Aquinas did 800
years ago. If I can't see the faces, I can't know anything
about them." So says a philosophy professor at the College
of Notre Dame of Maryland who, despite his learning, does
not yet fathom the many dimensions of knowledge. Oh well.
This (still) obligatory dismissive remark is only a minor
annoyance in an otherwise competent overview of the rise of
online learning today. Worth noting: "Enrollment in
distance education courses nationally has more than doubled
since 1997, to 3 million, according to the U.S. Department
of Education." be sure to follow the links in this story:
there's more - for example, the link to theUniversity of Maryland University College
doesn't just take you to the institution's home page, but
to a side-bar article. By Mike Bowler, baltimore Sun,
August 18, 2003 8:19 p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Aggregators Attack Info
Overload
I'm going to stop running these 'intro
to RSS' stories soon (obviously not today) because OLDaily
reader will have had more than their fill. This item (and a
second, see below) looks at the potential of RSS as a means
to handle information overload. It's not quite so
straightforward as the articles depict - how does one pick
which of 30,000 feeds to subscribe to, for example? Neither
of these items mentions Userland, arguably the first and
certainly the most important blogging software, a point
founder Dave Winer complains about. Winer has a point -
exactly the same point made by critics of the BlogCon
conference (see below). What goes around... By Ryan Singel,
Wired News, August 18, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Webloggers Deal Harvard Blog-Bores a Black
Eye
Dave Winer's efforts to organize a
conference called BloggerCon at Harvard's Berkman Law
School are attracting the attention - and ire - of some
bloggers. This article, in typical Register, pulls no
punches as it calls into question the political
affiliations of the speakers, the conference fee, and the
organization. BloggerCon didn't win any friends earlier
this week either when it billed itself as "the first
international conference on blogging" - in complete
ignorance, apparently, of the highly successful and
influential (not to mention international) Blogtalk
conference in Vienna a few months ago. By Andrew Orlowski,
The Register, August 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
New Wave of Newsreader Software Makes Sense
of the Web
Article describing and linking to
news reader software. These are programs designed to read
RSS files and which hence help headers 'make sense' of the
web. People are beginning to sense the wide potential of
RSS, and hence, of the semantic web as a whole, and this
article touches on that. By Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury
News, August 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Ten Tips from Jane Knight
Jay
Cross highlights one of Britain's major voices in
e-learning, Jane Knight, listing her top ten tips for
implementing e-learning. The tips are by now old saws -
tend to informal learning, use simpler solutions, and
communication and collaboration are key. By Jay Cross,
Internet Time, August 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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