August 25, 2006

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I am back home in Moncton, having taken the train back from Halifax this afternoon. If I owe you email, or a commentary, or a review, or anything else, it will be along soon. Meanwhile, why not enjoy these two sets of photos. The first set, from the small town of Petitcodiac, is from two bicycle trips there this month - and is therefore the record of my first time cycling 100 km in a single day. The second set, from Halifax, captures the short trip Andrea and I took there this week. Enjoy! [Tags: Flickr] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 1 Hits] I still haven't listened to it (sorry terry) but I cannot let the week go by without linking to this item. Terry Anderson also covers his interview. "We talked about distance ed, his time 'back on the land'. We talked about where education might be going... and we talked about athabasca's new EDD program starting (maybe) next year." [Tags: Online Learning, Linking and Deep Linking] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] I would say not, though the stocks for the first few weeks after the patent story broke were flat (though it has dipped recedntly). Alfred Essa links to the story saying Blackboard is currently a risky investment.

In another article, he points to the stock sales by Yahoo insiders in recent weeks. "The interesting thread here is not that Blackboard's officers are selling their stocks, but the staggering amount of compensation and windfall Blackboard officers are enjoying this year in the form of stock options." One of my colleagues added up the compensation and put the results - all $216,150,195.00 of it - onto an Excel spreadsheet for your enjoyment. So do you think your education dollars are being wisely spent?

Mark van Harmelen proposes "preventing Blackboard from registering any valid patents in the areas of elearning 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) by starting to document the state-of-the-art in these areas." good point, and some people (such as Dave Cormier) have been talking about improving the overall documentation in Wikipedia. [Tags: Personal Learning Environment, Wikipedia, Online Learning, Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, Yahoo!] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] The neat thing in this article is the direct link to the contract between Google and the University of California Library System to have Google digitize books. I have to think that if they have this agreement with the University of California Library System there won't be too many books that need digitizing after they're done. The title refers to the number of titles Google expects to digitize daily. [Tags: Google] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] Short video, useful if you want to rouse your (1.0) audidence before delivering your (2.0) presentation. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 9 Hits] Not everybody agreed with my response to proposals for blogging codes of ethics. Terry Freedman writes, "Downes may be correct in a logical sense, but I don't see how his position actually helps anyone working in schools." I won't infer from this that schools are illogical (though I could!) but will read this more charitably: Freedman is appealing to the utilitarian value of codes of ethics. They can be "both meaningful and useful."

Yes they can, but what is it that distinguishes a code of ethics from, say, instruction from a teacher or parent? It is one thing to tell people what they ought or ought not do - even I do that. And quite another to codify that. When something like ethics is codified, then this gives people room to be 'ethical' by watching for loopholes or playing legal games. It is better to adhere to the spirit of an ethic rather than the letter, to be ethical by holding your behaviour accountable to your own sense of good and right, not some arbitrary third party construction.

Because the rules will never be complete. Freedman writes, "Surely the starting point is to instil the ethical value of citing sources with permission, before bringing in the obvious exceptions?" But if the rule has exceptions, then the rule, as stated, is wrong. Shall we start listing exceptions? No, because then we could never stop? Another rule, then? No, because it, too, will have exceptions.

There is a reason we leave application of the law to the discretion of judges and not merely to adjudication of fact. The interpretation of referees and umpires rather than electronic sensors. Why we often appeal to the 'spirit of the law' rather than the letter. Why we think sticking to 'the letter of the law' is cheating.

The only 'morality' a person follows is his or her own, a feeling that this or that is right or wrong. Any appeal to an external sourse changes the definition from 'morality' to 'authority'.

Susan van Gelder also comments. [Tags: Web Logs, Schools, Cheating and Plagiarism, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] I always worry when someone promotes a new way to consult the public on health care, because the recent history of our system is that 85 percent of Canadians support the public system while business and government officials are forever trying to privatize it. This results in a cynicism about government, a cynicism that is frankly admitted at the beginning of this report. What follows is a good discussion of citizen participation in governance generally, and if you look for it you'll find what is for me a key factor: "participants must have a real impact on the policy and decision-making process." Will governments and business actually give up their entrenched power, as recommended here? [Tags: Canada] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]