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October 3, 2006

OLDaily

Various authors[Edit][Delete]: moka5 LivePCs, October 3, 2006

[link: 5 Hits] today began (at about 3:00 a.m. - I hate jet lag) with me messing around with moka5 LivePCs - "Once you have your LivePC on a USB stick or iPod you can plug into any x86 computer, do your thing, unplug and leave nothing behind." It is ending now with me about to reboot after uninstalling the software. Was it a dud? Not at all. But I'm just trying to cram too much onto this one tiny laptop. And maybe I should just download some demo computers to see how it works before trying to create my own. Walk before you can run, hm? Naaah.... [Tags: Portable Computers] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Tom Hoffman[Edit][Delete]: Turnitin vs. Student Intellectual Property Rights, Ed-Tech Insider [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 29 Hits] I know it's a long newsletter today, but I just have to echo Tom Hoffman's sentiments about Turnitin, which he posted about 10 days ago: "I can't see how a school can compel students to grant the use of their work to a commercial venture and then turn around and lecture to them about the ethics of file-sharing and the like." Quite right. More from Andy Carvin, who is doing us all a service in covering this story. [Tags: Newsletters, Schools, Cheating and Plagiarism] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Michael Feldstein[Edit][Delete]: Blackboard Conference Call, Part II, E-Literate [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 30 Hits] Michael Feldstein gives Blackboard credit for answering his questions (I don't - it was just a needed warmup for court) and then summarizes the general non-responsiveness offered by the company in its conference call last week. What I glean from the conversation - given that Blackboard won't open its patents, won't allow royalty-free use of them, won't abandon its lawsuit, etc., is that it intends to own the e-learning market. Including the open source side. Also: feldstein posts, then corrects, coverage of an article on the Texas district where the suit was filed. [Tags: Online Learning, Web Logs, Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, Open Source] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Dave Tosh[Edit][Delete]: Curverider Conference Presentations - On Video, October 3, 2006

[link: 13 Hits] Nice. This is the way to present conference coverage. Alsong with notes and summaries and blog posts of course. Chris McKillop talking about blogging and storytelling in education. Miles Berry on Elgg. Bill Fitzgerald talks about Drupal. And Kevin Jardine discusses OpenID (or so it says - I listened and it didn't really address OpenID). These talks are 15 minutes, on average - is this the standard now? Hm. I love this bit: Kevin Jardine points offscreen and says, "Is this... visible?" Related (sort of): ELGG Spaces. [Tags: Web Logs] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Alfred Thompson[Edit][Delete]: Are You Teaching Regular Expressions?, Computer Science Teacher [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 5 Hits] Goodness. Teach regular expressions. More useful than SQL, in my opinion, and the basis for my autotagging system. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Michael Geist[Edit][Delete]: Defective by Design's Day Against DRM, October 3, 2006

[link: 7 Hits] Michael Geist marks the occasion, as do I, and posts 30 things people can do about DRM and anti-circumvention legislation. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Bud Hunt[Edit][Delete]: Yarn. Again., But the Teacher [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Is what I am saying about networks that radical, despite the protestations here there and everywhere? No! It's not even that original, if you look at it closely. And it is being stated widely, if people would just look. Witness: "The reason for the yarn? I wanted people to see the connections that they have to their colleagues... Participants wanted me to show then how to blog and podcast with their students -- I rejected that idea. The best only way to learn how to create learning networks with students is to create a personal learning network yourself." [Tags: Online Learning, Web Logs, Networks, Podcasting] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Konrad Glogowski[Edit][Delete]: To Ungroup a Class, Blog of Proximal Development [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Continuing the conversation on groups and networks. Konrad Glogowski observes, "Putting my students into groups would have led many of them to acquiesce to the presence of a louder or more confident peer... Groups tend to focus on compromises, on reducing all individual voices to commonalities that all members can agree on and that all members see as somehow representative of their individual voices... We reduce its rich constituent parts to one voice." Exactly right. [Tags: Networks] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Barbara Ganley[Edit][Delete]: A Recent Conversation on Blogging for The Vermont State Colleges, bgblogging [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] I like the way Barbara Ganley very clearly connects the use of blogs in learning with a new approach to learning. "... now that we have online communications and identity formation, we have an opportunity to put into actual practice learning as conversation with the subject matter, with others, with thinkers who have come before us. Then we will consider the learner's connections to prior learning, to cultural backgrounds, to self, to the world, to the workplace and to us as interconnected, constantly evolving influences on the learning. We will no longer isolate our classroom discourse, or our students. As Paolo Freire tells us, 'The teacher is no longer the one who teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.'" [Tags: Online Learning, Web Logs, Academic Publications] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Various authors[Edit][Delete]: AntWeb, October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Ah, you just know I love stuff like this. AntWeb is essentially a learning resource about ants. And as ATS Blog notes, "Users of Google Earth can now plot all the ants known to AntWeb on a 3-dimensional interactive globe of satellite images." Too cool. [Tags: Cool, Google] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Bob Irving[Edit][Delete]: Squeakfest 2006 Report, October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Hm. "It is self-indulgent of us as teachers to say that we can spend 3 hours a week with a student and give them wonderful experiences. What about the billion other children on the planet? What about the rest of the hours for that child? Our task is to identify powerful ideas that have been dis-empowered. Then re-empower them." A lot of people have called me radical and idealistic over the last week. But from my perspective, the radicals are those clinging to an old system that doesn't work in order to preserve a privilege that doesn't sustain. Seymour Papert's address to Squeakfest is available on MP3. [Tags: Experience, Children and Child Learning] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Seymour Papert[Edit][Delete]: Why School Reform Is Impossible, The Journal of the Learning Sciences [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 5 Hits] "The structure of School is so deeply rooted that one reacts to deviations from it as one would to a grammatically deviant utterance: Both feel wrong on a level deeper than one's ability to formulate reasons. This phenomenon is related to 'assimilation blindness' insofar as it refers to a mechanism of mental closure to foreign ideas. I would make the relation even closer by noting that when one is not paying careful attention, one often actually hear the deviant utterance as the 'nearest' grammatical utterance a transformation that might bring drastic change in meaning." [Tags: Schools] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Tony Karrer[Edit][Delete]: Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging?, Learning Circuits Blog [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] The learning Circuits blog asks people to respond - and what I really like is that they ask people to respond on their own blogs, not the Learning Circuits blog (this is actually a much larger advance in thinking than it may seem, since the temptation is always to bring writers in to a centralized source). My own contribution is therefore posted on my own blog. [Tags: Online Learning, Web Logs] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Charles M. Reigeluth and Alison Carr-Chellman[Edit][Delete]: A Common Language and Knowledge Base for ID?, IT Forum [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] I was all prepared to rake this one over the coals. After all, I have been reading the comments on IT Forum for the last month, and it seems like Yet Another Attempt to impose order on a messy discipline. But I hadn't read the paper, so I held off linking to it here. Good thing. It is actually a pretty good paper, if you take it at face value, as an analysis of the various aspects and dimensions of eductaional theory (or, instructional design, or...). But I would still resist it as an attempt to reorder and reframe the discipline. There are some fundamentals to address first. [Tags: Linking and Deep Linking] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Jeff Utecht[Edit][Delete]: The Death of the Reference Page, TechLearning [Edit][Delete]Techlearning [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] And about time, I would say. I have never had the patience to deal with those pages, and worse, the artificially constraining manuals of style imposed on writers (is this what I trained ten years to do?) in lieu of proper linking. "With the ease of hyperlinking, along with the pingback and trackback systems used by web 2.0 applications, we have officially changed the way we need to teach the citation of work." [Tags: Linking and Deep Linking] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Open Doorways, October 3, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Another resource to add to this list. "Extending the conversation from the Ohio Digital Commons for Education Conference." Some good posts, including an MP3 interview with Mark taylor. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

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.

Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations - or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence.