By Stephen Downes
July 26, 2004
Globe and Mail Registration
I am a
frequent reader of the Globe and Mail online and also a
frequent purchaser of the printed version of the newspaper.
I receive the daily email alerts, and as has so often been
the case, clicked on a link from the Daily Tech Alert.
Imagine my surprise when, instead of the story about
Google's IPO I expected to read, I was confronted with a
registration page. This time it's personal. By Stephen
Downes, Stephen's Web, July 26, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Learning Material Repositories - Rafts or
Battleships? - Part 2
Carried over from Pasrt 1, this article looks at the
incredibly high barrier to entry to e-learning technologies
and what to do about it. "What is required are tools and
environments which don't assume that learning objects are
necessarily contained within their repository system but
which can either 'pull' objects from a variety of sources
and repositories, or provide the means by which relevant
objects can be found and accessed." By Derek Morrison,
Auricle, July 23, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Blogs and Wikis as WebQuest
Tasks
Short but nice presentation, with a number
of good links, on the use of blogs and wikis in webquests.
From the presentation: Three that seem immediately
applicable to blogs are Simulated Diary, Travel Account,
and Historical Story. Imagine, for example, if the
Experiencing India's Caste System WebQuest was wrapped
around a collection of blogs, one for each caste, and
pulled together under one master page as in The Spot." By
Bernie Dodge, NECC 2004, June 25, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Reservations from IEE for Scientific
Publishing Report
Tired, tired, tired. That's
all I can say about this press release documenting the
Institution of Electrical Engineers's (IEE) "grave
reservations regarding the Science and Technology
Committee's call for scientific publishers to move to an
open-access publishing mode." Peter Suber skewers the
response thus: "It objects that the upfront funding model
will compromise peer review (reply), that it will exclude work from
poor countries (reply), and that it will allow research
corporations that formerly paid subscriptions to get OA
journals for free (reply)." By Press Release, IEE, July 21,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
How Emerging Technologies May Soon Replace
Established Telecom Infrastructures
No
breakthrough yet, but you have to think that we're in the
last days of traditional telephone service. "The time,
technology and economics have arrived to make it possible
for any sufficient number of us to create our own
independent telephone system and to be free from telecom
providers and monthly phone bills forever." By Unknown,
Kolabora, July, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
autounfocus
David Wiley's
autounfocus is back and at a new location, http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/. The RSS Feed has also moved.
By David Wiley, autounfocus, July, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
UKeU - Peeling the Onion - layer
2
Derek Morrison's dissection of the UKeU
hearings was pre-empted by the release of the official
(uncorrected) transcripts of the hearings, but I'm sure the
official version doesn't capture the testiness of the
exchange as well as this summary. One the one hand, we have
Sir Anthony Cleaver saying " ... one should have given this
the chance to succeed or you should not have started it. I
think, having started it, they owed it to us to give us
long enough to show that we could be successful ..." On the
other hand, we have the queries about the 9.5 million Pound
e-learning contracted to Sun. "So what's going to happen to
the apparently valuable asset? Not much according to John
Beaumont: 'I would be suprised if it was able to be widely
used ... it's not a simple application, people would need
to be trained on it, people would need to know how to
support it ... '" Ouch. I don't think Sun will be too
welcome in London for a while. By Derek Morrison, Auricle,
Ju,ly 26, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Funded Projects - Canada
Some
program funding announcements for Canadian readers. CANARIE
has announced a Request For Proposals for the New Media Research Matrix; three or four
projects will be selected, with program funding not to
exceed $400,000 for any given project. Your deadline is
August 12. CANARIE is also accepting IWAY Awards submissions until September
24. The Office of Learning Technologies has also issued a
Call for Proposals - Community Learning
Networks for its 2004 funding program, with assistance
available of up to $600,000 over three years. Deadline for
applications to this program is August 31. Guidelines are here. By Various Authors,
Government of Canada, July, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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