OLDaily

New blog on tagging containing links such as Ian Davis on Why Tagging is Expensive and defense of tagging to counter Gene Smith argument. Tagging is the rage these days, especially in Web 2.0 circiles. And as Rashmi Sinha observes, it is cognitive cheaper than selecting categories. Still. I'm not going to go back and tag 8,000 posts every time a new tag is developed (which is about every other day). Nor am I going to launch into tag campaigns. My approach, courtesy the new Search Page I completed over the week-end, is automatic tagging. Does it work? See my revised Research Page or even the 'tags' at the end of this post (not linked to Technorati, of course - brand lock-in is so Web 1.0). [Tags: Folksonomies, Web 2.0, Ontologies, Research, Web Logs, Brands and Branding] [Comment]

Another new podcast in education, Soft Reset, from Learning in Hand, discusses the selection of a handheld in education. For thouse of you who produce e-learning podcasts, note that it is much more difficult to get a listing here in OLDaily because I have to listen to the podcast before I add it, and I only have so many hours in a day (several of which are already committed to Daily Source Code, IT Conversations, Old Time Radio, and music from my Creative Zen). [Tags: Podcasting, Portable Computers, Online Learning] [Comment]

I'm just about finished posting these "What is Web 2.0" articles in this newsletter, and will begin shifting focus to implementation details, impacts and their effect on learning. But for now, this article is a good overview of some of the key features (you've seen them all elsewhere and earlier). Boris Mann offers three more links in the same vein: "Troy Angrignon's post on the mental evolution that people go through from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Danah Boyd's post on Why Web 2.0 matters, where she goes through more of the social and business changes taken place that are being aided/accelerated by technology. And What is Web 2.0," the blog. And on ITForums, Jeremy Zawodny describes how Yahoo is becoming a Web 2.0 company. Via George Siemens, meanwhile, comes this large list of Web 2.0 software from Emily Chang. [Tags: Web 2.0, Newsletters, Web Logs] [Comment]

Summary of the use of games in learning which, interestingly, looks at the economics of the use of games. "A quick review of the session titles reveals a staggering range of issues developers must consider in creating such products - from financial to demographics to markets to licensing to intellectual property issues." Sure. Why should gaming be any different from the mess that characterizes the rest of educational technology? [Tags: Games and Gaming, Copyright and Patent Issues] [Comment]

If you've got a few hours for the download (it's a PowerPoint presentation weighing in at 36 megabytes) you might find this look at informal learning environments interesting. "This presentation by Malcolm Brown and Phil Long identifies three trends as significantly influencing the present and future of informal learning space design: Intentional support for social learning strategies, informed by principles, a return to human-centered design, and support for diverse, personally-owned devices to enrich academic learning." [Tags: Academics and Academia] [Comment]

well I don't agree but I'm not surprised: "Becta's research has shown that Shibboleth is the most suitable solution for securely accessing online content for the education sector and should be adopted as an integral component in the strategic approach to the future development of ICT in education, skills and children's services." The benefits of Shibboleth are pretty easy to recognize: it's an open source single sign-on solution that improves personalization and reduces costs and security issues. Add to that the need for 'trust' between users, providers and infrastructure managers, and you've pretty much already selected Shibboleth. My issue with Shibboleth is that I want my ID to carry over to and from sites that schools and publishers don't 'trust' - outside the federation, in other words. PDF or MS-Word. [Tags: Shibboleth, Open Source, Children and Child Learning, Personalization, Security Issues, Research, Schools, Online Learning, Books and eBooks] [Comment]

MIT - which really knows how to market - picked up a lot of publicity for the non-launch of its $100 laptop. Released in the announcement were the plans for the new device, along with a hint at the marketing strategy. Here's the announcement at MIT and some images. The hand-crank power source is a great idea (someone should rig a bicycle attachment). [Tags: Marketing, Portable Computers] [Comment]

I have never really though of John Seely Brown as the freddie Mercury of e-learning, but the thought apparently crossed Brian Lamb's mind during the course of his writing a summary of Brown's talk at the Open Learning conference last week-end in Utah. Nice pictures; the write-up is a little brief but I couldn't resist ensuring that the second picture received a wider distribution. [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Online Learning] [Comment]

I though this was a pretty good example of the new face of online learning. Students in this class are charged with creating an online record of what was taught in the class, and after reading some of their chatter on the discussion board we are linked to one of their projects, a summary of sines and cosigns. The point here is that this is quite a good post and worthy of distribution in its own right. The main link isn't responding well at the moment (remember, put external resources, such as Feed2JS links (the culprit in this instance; see below) at the bottom of your page source, so it loads last). [Tags: Chat and Chat Rooms, Project Based Learning, Web Logs, Online Learning] [Comment]

If you click on the link, it won't work, which is the point of this item. Alan Levine writes (in an email): "Our "jade" server that hosts the Feed2JS service (http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/) has apparently been compromised and engaging in inappropriate amounts of network traffic. Our security team has been monitoring this for a week and at this point, I recommended the server be taken off the network until we can rebuild/eradicate the problem. That said, any site using one of our JavaScript feed embedder will either hang or fail to load. To compensate, I can only suggest that they substitute in their JavaScript embedded feeds and replace this part of the feed string: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ with one of the external mirror sites: http://mirrors.wehost4u.net/feed2js/ " [Tags: Networks, Security Issues] [Comment]