OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
November 19, 2004

New Directions in Learning
Today's brief newsletter is coming from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, in Canada's north where, I'm happy to report, my hotel came equipped with free broadband internet access. Today is just a brief update as I'm off to give a seminar in fifteen minutes; I'll follow up with a fuller newsletter tonight. This item consists of slides and MP3 audio (Part One (7.6M), Part Two (9.2M)). You know you're speaking to the right group when three of them are wearing those black "I'm blogging this" t-shirts. :) By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, November 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

IBM, Apple Deliver Digital Media Standard
From the article: "The software - the Digital Media Framework - has been developed in cooperation with Microsoft competitors, Apple, Adobe and Cisco. It's described as a digital media framework, and is intended for use in creating, managing and distributing rich-media content. It's also being set to enter the market at lower cost than Microsoft's offering." By Jonny Evans, Macworld, November 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Schools Our Kids Would Build
Today's theme, at least for me, is drawn from some remarks Bill Clinto made yesterday. "Every person has a story to tell," he said. This strikes me as one of the cores of my own beliefs. Each person is important, each person contributes. So it's in this spirit that we look at this article describing design ideas for schools submitted by children. One passage struck me: "A recurring theme of likening school to a prison is found in competition entries, both past and present, suggesting that, from the point of view of those compelled to attend, little has altered in the basic character of school in spite of the vast extent of policy intervention over the intervening period." By Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, Architecture Week, November 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Where Ideas Collide, Innovation Happens
The main point of the book The Medici Effect, reviewed here in this article, seems right to me: when and where "different cultures, domains, and disciplines stream together toward a single point," they may "connect, allowing for established concepts to clash and combine, ultimately forming a multitude of new, groundbreaking ideas." By John Stuckey, Ubiquity, November, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Google Scholar
I could cover just this item today, and it would still be a full newsletter. Google scholar searches the databases of acadmeic publications and returns listings of published papers. One neat new feature: for any paper, it also shows the cites. The service is still new and so the cites are a bit incomplete, but it is certainly an advance over what was there. CiteSeer could learn a bit from the smooth Google interface. If Citeseer stays in business, that is. By Various Authors, November 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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