OLDaily
Well I'm still in Ottawa - the weather did not cooperate with my flight plans. So today's issue is a bit early, but packed full of goodness. Linger over this one. To begin, a link to what e-learning 2.0 looks like in its glossy PR version, as the Fall issue of Interactive Educator (put out by Smart Technologies) glosses it up and puts a nice product-focus on it, complete with the requisite blogerati commentary between the advertisements. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Web Logs,
Marketing] [
Comment]
One of the outcomes of the conference on personal learning environments last week in Edinburgh was this PLE Reference Model. I like the way they map various usage scenarios, and the entity diagram (slide 19) is a thing of beauty. Still. Does it map into the e-learning framework (or whatever it's called this week) as suggested? Doeds the flow diagram (slide 25) capture what the PLE is really supposed to be? I feel a tension between what the PLE ought to be and the constraints being imposed on the design from the outset. But that could be nothing more than an artifact of my own perception - I wish I had more to work with than the slides. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Scotland,
E-Framework] [
Comment]
As james Farmer says, "you know you’re doing something right if people start trying to stop you" (I know the feeling). Still, it is a bit hard to understand why Farmer's outstanding
edublogs service is being blocked by some school districts. As Graham Wegner explains in the comments, "the vast majority of Aussie state schools... use a watchdog program called Bess (I think) and heaps of stuff gets blocked - blogs, hosted webpages, flickr etc." It is worth mentioning that OLDaily is frequently blocked in Australia - I remember a few weeks ago being shut out of the entire state of Queensland. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Queensland,
Web Logs,
Schools,
Flickr] [
Comment]
A big issue at the Open Source in Education conference I attended in Heerlen last week was the ongoing dispute about software patents in Europe - the legislation that will not go away, no matter how many times it is defeated, it seems. An outcome of the conference was an initiative struck from the perspective of e-learning to work against this legislation. To me, software patents legislation represents a very bad idea, and the continued attempts to push it through no matter what the cost are damaging not only to the technology community in general but to the idea of representative democracy as a whole. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Copyright and Patent Issues,
European Union] [
Comment]
Good insight into the use of blogging in learning. "Blogging is not going to miraculously transform struggling and reluctant writers... merely giving students blogs and time to write can never be an effective strategy. What needs to develop first is a sense of community. And yes, the students need to go through that process first before anything valuable starts happening." [Tags:
Web Logs] [
Comment]
I'm a bit late on this, and wasn't sure I'd run it all, but the October issue of Learning Technology offers as much insight as I've seen anywhere into the development of e-learning in Armenia. Really: there's a good dozen (short) articles on the subject. Fantastic! [Tags:
Online Learning] [
Comment]
Good overview of approaches to digital rights management (DRM) in education, with a focus on Europe. The first half of the paper describes approaches to DRM in general, though with an emphasis on traditional textbooks and like content, and with an emphasis on the sale of learning content (open access is not mentioned). The paper hits its stride in the second part as a variety of business models is discussed, each with examples and links, and even better, actual pricing information. PDF. Via elearningeuropa.info [Tags:
Online Learning,
European Union,
Digital Rights Management (DRM)] [
Comment]
Very useful paper for those with an interest in metadata and indexing. The first third of the paper discusses open access publishing; good stuff, a nice review, but not really new. The second third is a useful discussion of indexing services and techniques currently extant, drawing from both commercial and non-commercial services. Finally, the authors discuss their own proposal, and following a survey process, recommend the integration of parsing tools into institutional repository software to ease metadata creation, a distributed, harvest-based system for metadata indexing ("Do not have one body/organisation to produce/maintain the citations. Make references and citations available for harvesting and use by anyone who is interested"), support for reference-linking, and much more. Good discussion, great research. Via EdNA. [Tags:
Information,
Learning Object Repositories,
Linking and Deep Linking,
Research,
Metadata,
EdNA] [
Comment]
There's a lot to disagree with in this paper (for example, the selection of literature to be studied in order to find patterns, assertions about the impact of rural digital access) but I am more interested in the positive thesis: "Our challenge is to find ways to use what new media have to offer in productive ways but, at the same time, to become, together with our students, critical and capable users: to engage in pattern recognition." Pattern perception is basic to cognition (and more), and I've been thinking about that recently: how would we alter the cognitive landscape of children if we taught them at an early age how their brain works, not only in the sense of teaching them how to recognize patterns, but also in the sense that the brain naturally completes partial patterns based on pre-existing 'templates' in the brain - to teach them, in other words, how prior conceptions inform current perceptions. That's what's happening in this paper, I think, and something I have been mindful of in my own thinking. I need to think more about this. [Tags:
New Media,
Children and Child Learning] [
Comment]
This working paper argues that while a learning management system is suitable for distance learning, the wider scope of e-learning requires not just an LMS but a set of tgools, characterized in seven layers or types of service. Good discussion, moving in the same general direction as other commentators cited here. "The advent of Web 2.0 should enable educators to understand the needs of teachers and learners
using technology enabled services, so that education desktops can be simply designed to specifically suit the needs of teachers and learners, and at the same time provide a large set of choices for services, information, and data." [Tags:
Online Learning,
Web 2.0] [
Comment]
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I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.
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