OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
June 17, 2005

New Open Access Journal for Human-centered ICT Research
Just launched, a new open access journal, Human Technology. The first issue, available now, is on mobile communications. The next issue will cover technology and learning. By Dan Atkins, Dan Atkins on CLEAR, June 17, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Rescuing Social Networking
This link is here mostly for the graphic at the top, a nice conceptual vision of conferencing. But also for this sharp analysis of where social networks have been failing: "existing SNAs offer the user little to do, take too much time, don't provide a customized audience, are socially awkward, and don't provide much that other features of the Internet don't do as well or better." And for the advice near the end suggesting that "what would really make SVP cool would be if we could meter it... [and] automatically bill them and pay us for our time at an agreed-upon rate." Which left me wondering what my market rate would be billed per minute. And whether it would be possible to make a living doing that (methinks not). By Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, June 16, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Do We Really Need Learning Objectives?
George Siemens asks whether we really need learning objectives. The answer, of course, is no. "The very process of writing objectives states that we know what learners need to know.... Learners should be able to input their own needs and interest (or personal objectives) into the process." And I agree - but, of course, the devil is in the details. By George Siemens, Connectivism Blog, June 14, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

How To Save Public Education
Kind of a nifty idea - ideas on how to save publication, sorted by plans that take five minutes, five days, five weeks, five months and five years. Nifty, but I wish the ideas were a bit better, that the thinking was a bit deeper. Still, the main point - that you can do something now and in the long term - holds. Oh, and this item really should have been published 43 days ago. By GLEF Staff, Edutopia, June 17, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Interactive Whiteboards
Blog set up by Joop van Schie to collect information on interactive whiteboards. The first post is a comprehensive resource in itself, liting numerous products, articles, and other resources. If you have something to contribute, send Joop a note. Via pete MacKay, who is on a roll this week. By Joop van Schie, Interactive Whiteboards, June 17, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

NESTA Futurelab Research
Rod Savoie sends this item along, a link to a series of literature reviews in topics related to education and learning technology - topics such as student centered learning, games and learning, e-assessment, mobile technologies, and more. The articles are really hard to read - the HTML displays two narrow columns of text in the middle of the page, while the PDF (which launches in a popup) tries to stuff two large pages in a single frame. The content is good, though as these are "literature reviews" they depend exclusively on published "literature" and hence are a bit out of date and certainly under-represent the range of thinking in the field. That doesn't mean they're not worth reading, though. By Various Authors, NESTA Futurelab, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Eighth International Open Forum on Metadata Registries
Presentations (PowerPoint, zipped files) are now available from the from the Eighth International Open Forum on Metadata Registries held last week. The theme was Semantic Interoperability: Where Meaning Meets Metadata. Many great items; I list a few below:

- Bruce Bargmeyer offers a very nice outline of metadata concepts, relations between metadata organizations, and metadata expressed in graph structure.
- Thomas Bandholtz looks at topics maps as a means of linking metadata.
- Gerhard Budin discusses e-learning metadata and learning outcomes in a multicultural perspective.
- Gerry Cunningham describes UNEP.net, an open metadata discovery framework.
- Sam Chance, discussing the Extended Metadata Registry (XMDR), offers a nice Observe-Orient-Decide-Act framework (slide 5) and a great metadata complexity diagram (slide 6)
- Cynthis Dickinson talks about the disconnect between classification scheme items and their meanings. "There is no place for “meaning” to be described." (Slide 11)
- Frank Farance explains metadata registries interoperability and bindings

Many, many more. By Various Authors, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Intel Aims To Gather 300 Universities By 2006 For Its Mobile Programme
According to this item, "Intel Corporation is looking at wiring up to 300 universities in the Asia Pacific under its Mobile Initiative for Learning in Education (MILE) programme by end of next year." By Unattributed, Bernama.com, June 17, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Resources for Round One of the Toolkit Projects Now Available
These resources relate to the E-Learning Framework as supported by Britrain's JISC. Navigation to the resources themselves is just awful; the link you are given opens this page, where you need to notice links to the projects have opened in the left margin; click on a project such as APIS and then back to the left hand margin where (look carefully now) a link to the project resources page has opened. You're still not there. You need to click on the link titled APIS project web site (buried in the main panel) which will take you to a page with the link. Click on the link to get to the project page, then from there click on the deliverables link, from which you click the code link which is (finally) the resource first mentioned eight pages ago, hosted on SourceForge. Do the same for the remaining seven projects - but be prepared for more hurdles. At the D+ site, for example, you will be advised to "please get in touch" if you want to test the resource, while the PSE site simply doesn't exist. Awful. By Sarah Holyfield, JISC, June 14, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

e-Learning Framework Toolkits
Here is what the preceeding item should have done instead. Here is a list of projects, their project home sites, and direct links to code (or to downloadables, where code is not available):

[site] [code] Assessment Provision through Interoperable Segments (APIS)
[site] [code] Brokerage for Deep and Distributed e-Learning Resources Discovery (D+)
[site] [code] Integrating Simple Sequencing (ISIS)
[site] [code] Middleware for Distributed Cognition (MDC) (previously (?) JAFER)
[site] [code] Portal Services Embedder (PSE) (Site reporting a 404)
[site] [code] Service based LEarning Design (SLED)
[site] [code] Enterprise Web Services with Timetable Extentions for Microsoft.Net (SWEET)
[site] [code] Web Services for Reflective Learning (WS4RL)

By Various Authors, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Remember...
[Refer] - send an item to your friends
[Research] - find related items
[Reflect] - post a comment about this item

Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter?

Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/subscribe.cgi

[About This NewsLetter] [OLDaily Archives] [Send me your comments]