OLDaily

Sherry Saavedra[Edit][Delete]: Schools Weigh Control Versus 1st Amendment, San Diego Union-Tribune [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 1 Hits] As you have probably guess, I was not lucky in Innsbruck, and so did not have internet access from my hotel yesterday. I am now at the Microlearning conference here, which I will address tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, here is yet another MySpace article, which I am linking to not because it's the same-old same-old, but because of the incredible variety of behaviours it reports (and reports as being objectionable). For example: "a student had posted a snapshot on MySpace of his answer sheet for a standardized test. He had blown off the assessment and bubbled in answers in a pattern that formed the message, 'I hate tests.'"

I thought that was pretty funny, because it's just the sort of thing I would have done in school. And I can remember some pretty creative submissions in the tests I have marked. I can also remember things like bullying, cheating, and everything else described in this article.

And it seems to me that the problem isn't MySpace - the problem is the school. I mean, why not look at these behavours - now that they are public - and ask why students engage in them. Instead of trying to hide everything again by blocking MySpace, or to punish people after the fact, why not ask, 'what would lead a student to think that this is appropriate?' Or (as I suspect) are we afraid to? [Tags: Online Learning, Assessment, Linking and Deep Linking, Schools, Cheating and Plagiarism] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Scott Leslie[Edit][Delete]: Project Pad - Web-Based Media Annotation and Collaboration, Ed Tech Post [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Of course we want this, don't we? "It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription." More on the Sakai Conference presentations. And as Scott Leslie points out, there's a "whole segment of the edu-blogosphere I don't know about" devoted to Sakai stuff. [Tags: Podcasting, Technorati] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Scott Leslie[Edit][Delete]: UMW's Bluehost/Fantastico Experiment, Ed Tech Post [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 9 Hits] Yes, well, aren't we all going in the same direction now? I mean, isn't this what the whole PLE discussion is: "Still, Gardner and his crew are to be totally commended for their approach - maybe instead of a 'learning management operating system' we might start thinking about a control panel for instructor-controlled (or student controlled, how about sticking that in your pipe!) mix- and matchable lightweight apps that already had the connectors to the SIS and authentication systems built in (or can these be the same thing?)." [Tags: Operating Systems] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

David Davies[Edit][Delete]: Edublog Simile Generator, June 8, 2006

[link: Hits] Because we all need to simile now and then. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: Captain Copyright Caught Copying, Broadband Reports [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 1 Hits] Michael geist, Techdiret and others have been all over this story; most of the links are available here. My own view, of course, is that the publishing industry has never respected content creators, and that the campaign to enforce copyrights is a sham. More fun with Captain Canada from Clarence Fisher. [Tags: Canada, Copyright and Patent Issues] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Gardner Campbell[Edit][Delete]: Surprised by YouTube, Gardner Writes [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: Hits] Exactly right (except - who has time to watch all those video?): "we're witnessing not just the now-routine Internet phenomenon of major new resources, but also massively and unpredictably scaled repositories of public domain materials that are vital information resources for ourselves and our students... we will find our students bringing archival gems into the classroom, casually and crucially. At that point, the professor's role as advanced learner... will be explicit and essential as never before." Via Brian Lamb. [Tags: Online Learning, Web Logs, Learning Object Repositories] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Jeff Jarvis[Edit][Delete]: Books Will Disappear. Print is Where Words To To Die, The Guardian [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 1 Hits] I was thinking about this in the train station in Manchester. I once wanted to be a science fiction author, an ambition I sometimes secretly reconsider. But these days, they only publish what seems like one or two science fiction authors. It was always a nice job, but now even more so. "In print, books rely on scarce shelf space, gatekeeping agents and editors, and expensive production." Just one more strike against books - and to me, the critical one. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Jon Udell[Edit][Delete]: On Business/Education Partnership, Infoworld [Edit][Delete]InfoWorld [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 5 Hits] I'm not so sold on Ruby, though I do think it's elegant. But I do share a lot in common with this view of learning: "Thanks to personal online publishing and to an emerging cultural ethos of transparency, there is an exciting new possibility in the world. A young person today who is interested in software can find out what it is like to be a software developer -- by evaluating products, by reading the accounts of people creating them, by making contact with those folks, and by contributing to real projects." To me the key words here are real projects - it is this, I think, that makes all the difference. Thanks to Peter Rawsthorne for the link. [Tags: Ruby, Project Based Learning] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Laura Mullane[Edit][Delete]: Eyes Wide Open: Five Views of Quality in Online Education, American Council on Education [Edit][Delete] June 8, 2006

[link: 1 Hits] Not five different theories so much as five different people being interviewed for this article on quality. Also some good links, at the top of the article, on some recent reports and studies on quality. Good quick read, and a good starting point for more reading. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]