By Stephen Downes
October 9, 2003
NMC Online Conference on Learning
Objects
I've signed up for the NMC Online
Conference on Learning Objects (even though it costs money)
partially because it's interesting to me but mostly because
part of it trakes places across the hall from my office.
OK, I'm kidding (it's just I hate to admit to paying money
for online content, even if the paying of money consisted
in a request to Sophie). Anyhow. How do we get some wider
value out of this conference, which features speakers
online such as Wayne Hodgins, Peter Samis and Ellen Wagner?
Edu_RSS topics, of course. A number of bloggers are
presenting (and hence, presumably signed up (though
probably for free)). Edu_RSS will capture blogs with the
string 'NMC' somewhere in the first 600 characters. And
readers can follow along the combined megablog through the
Edu_RSS NMC feed (HTML, Javascript, RSS,
Atom...). Just so you know, coming soon is a mechanism to
create your own feeds like this, so I don't have to, as
well as a general code release, so you don't need to depend
on my feed selections. By Various Authors, October 14-17,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Stealing the Goose From the
Common
This old poem is making the rounds again, and its worth passing on
with a link to its many variant forms from Google - a list
that also happens to be a Reader of arguments against the
current land-grab taking place in cyberspace:
They
hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose
from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common
from the goose. By Anonymous, The Tickler
Magazine, February 1, 1821
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Matrix of Some Uses of Blogs in
Education
This is a pretty nice start - be sure
to click on the link in this post to the diagram - of a
documentation effort to track the uses of blogs in
education. Send your comments and suggestions to Scott. By
Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, October 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention
System
This report explains how to disable a
copy-prevention method applied to an album released by BMG
by simply pressing the shift key. DRM Watch gets the analysis right: "this
is a superb example of what DRM Watch believes is
inherently wrong with the anticircumvention provision of
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Act allows
technology that patently (pun intended) doesn't work - and
SunnComm's MediaMax is hardly the only example - to be
protected by the threat of criminal prosecution.
Halderman's work is probably not criminally liable, because
DMCA 1201 carves out circumvention for research purposes,
but an ordinary consumer pressing Shift while inserting a
CD into a drive may be breaking U.S. federal law. This is
simply absurd. The law allows any technology marketed and
sold as 'copy protection' to be shielded in this way." Now
my own position, of course, is that unbreakable copy
protection is overkill. But that position aside, making
copy protection 'unbreakable' by law, not technology, is
the short road to disaster. And for a laugh, this... By John A. Halderman, Princeton
University, October 6, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Seventh-Graders Learn to Build Robots With
Legos
This is the sort of hands-on activity that
will over time come to typify online learning (why do
people think online learning is merely reading a computer
screen?). Lego supports this sort of activity with its Mindstorms program, and modding has
become a major driver for Lego. ""It's hard to say, but I
think it's led to increased sales," says Soren Lund, a director at Lego in
Denmark. "It has kept the product vibrant and alive, even
today." But many companies prohibit modding; Sony, for
example, has required a customer to remove code from his
website that allows his robotic Aibo dog to dance. But back
to the main point - modding (by design or by invention) is a
more likely future for online learning than reading texts
and taking assignments. Assuming, that is, that modding is
still legal in a few years. (This blog entry was built
using Mark Oehlert's weblog archives, today's ENC Headline
News, Google Search, Slashdot, Lego, CNN's Money Report.)
By Sara Sleyster, Des Moines Register, October 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Click from Microsoft to Amazon
OK,
leaving aside the implications this has with respect to
large, overbearing software companies, open distribution
systems, online commerce, and the like, let's focus on the
strategy behind the deal which allows Microsoft to offer
users of its software products access to Amazon's complete
library through a feature in Office. This is the
direction we're headed with online content, including
learning content - rather than thinking of learning as
something that is accessed and run separately from
applications, we need to think of it as something that will
run within an application. This works for learning objects,
suitably construed, but not at all, really, for online
courses. What bothers me is that with the five-year long
emphasis on courses and LMSs, we have as an industry really
squandered the chance to create anything like open access,
and it will be a long uphill climb from here. By Greg
Wiles, Seattle Post Intelligencer, October 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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