October 25, 2006

[link: Hits] Perhaps they were reading my coverage (the Tribune story is long gone, See this). Who knows? Anyhow, the MacArthur foundation is granting $2 million a year "for competitive research, writing, and demonstration projects." So my checque should be... oh, wait, they said competitive. Guess not, then, I am not of that political persuasion.

The grants have attracted some blog attention, with Harold Jarche taking a look and landing on the Spotlight blog, a group blog complete with a launch promo from Danah Boyd, all part of their (competitive?) Knowledge Network.

The grants were announced at a press release held inside Second Life and the winner of one grant, $240,000 will be going to Edward Castranova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, who is developing a massively multiplayer online game called Arden: The World of Shakespeare.

Mark Glaser, meanwhile, cites Boyd extensively in his look at the grants, which becomes an article on whether the web is dangerous for kids. I think this Boyd quote: "the authorities [have] started to catch predators by posing online, so MySpace has become more dangerous for predators than for teens!"

Beth Kanter, a trainer and consultant, live-blogged the event; the result is a pretty good (and thorough) column. She asks, "One of the points mentions that this is a new field - digital learning and media and that it was a cross disciplinary field. Given all this potential change in education, what do we need to think about how all this applies to nonprofit sector?" This is especially relevant given the overtly commercial focus of most media.

There's a lot more coverage - you could build a whole new edublogosphere out of it. Tom Hoffman complains, "None of the 'edubloggers' seem to know a damned thing about it... nobody other than me seems to have anything to say about it at all." Of course, this was five days ago - it takes time for the blogosphere to respond. But how? Hoffman writes, "Time to start sucking up? Or turning on the heat? Collectively we've got a lot of Google juice to bring to bear in this participatory media environment."

[Tags: Web Logs, Project Based Learning, Research, Google, Children and Child Learning, Technorati, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] According to this article, "University of Arizona students are learning how to build online business communities using technologies often grouped under the controversial and problematic Web 2.0 concept." Which of course is exactly what Web 2.0 is all about. Right? Isn't it? [Tags: Online Learning, Web 2.0] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] Because the usual channels are clogged with paid representatives from commercial software companies spreading fear, uncertainly and doubt (FUD) open source advocates have taken their lobbying campaign directly to government members, distributing a CD to each of Canada's Members of Parliament. I am not a part of this effort, though it certainly enjoys my support, as I can see first-hand how much money we spend on software that we don't have to. "During your work as an MP," they write, "we encourage you to ask the public service where they are including free/libre open source approaches in their acquisition, use, production and distribution of software. We hope you might encourage further investigation of its benefits within the Canadian Government." [Tags: Canada, Open Source] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 8 Hits] I am in Spain for the EDEN Workshop starting today. This is actually yesterday's newsletter - the wireless internet went down last night. Another newsletter will appear at the usual time, all else being equal. [Tags: Wireless, Newsletters] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 3 Hits] From the email press release: "SURF and JISC today published a model agreement that will help authors make appropriate arrangements with publishers for the publication of a journal article." In the proposed model, the author retains copyright, the publisher is granted a license to publish the work, and then (here's where it gets odd) "once the article has been published, the author can make it publicly accessible - in the form in which it was published by the publisher - by making it available as part of a digital scientific collection (a 'repository')." Why this additional restriction? Why not just let me run it on my website? [Tags: Books and eBooks, Accessibility, Learning Object Repositories, Copyright and Patent Issues, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 3 Hits] Presentations and discussion are now online from a recent joint meeting between the Assessment and the Repositories SIGs (Special Interest Groups) in JISC. "In considering whether item banks [for assessment] are repositories, it was felt that a repository is at the heart of an item bank system." Some criticisms of the presentation, made on an email list (I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me): "The Breeze presentations were vile, because the sound was so awful. This must be unnecessary as the MP3 was fine [and] many presentations did NOT include references that one could browse at leisure." [Tags: Assessment, Learning Object Repositories, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 16 Hits] This short and odd item is characterized by audacity more than anything else. From the Wall Street Journal (the original is obscured behind a subscription wall, so we thank University Business for the copyright-bending four paragraph excerpt), the point of the article is to note, "wages of college grads have fallen on average, after adjusting for inflation, in the past five years." Why? Well, there's this: "Labor's slice of the apple is smaller and corporate profits' slice is larger." But the article would like you to believe "that's probably temporary" and that the "more lasting trend" is "the very best-paid workers [PhDs, in other words] are getting the bulk of the raises." Like I said, audacity. I have never seen a time when the corporate share was shrinking. Temporary phenomenon, my eye. But PhDs had better beware an impending scapegoating. [Tags: Copyright and Patent Issues, Subscription Services] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 8 Hits] As the headline says, you can create a custom Google search engine by seeding it with a list of preferred URLs. Though as the article says, correctly, "The concept mirrors the approach of a small startup called Rollyo.com." Anyhow, Doug Belshaw has created an Edublog Search Engine using my Bloglines subscriptions as the list of URLs. It seems to me though that Google's technology needs some refining. On Google.com, when I search for 'Downes' I see my site at the top, as it should be. But in the Edublogosphere search we see Downes Wholesale Nursery at the top, which is not only odd, it is not even educational, and almost certainly not linked from any of the edublog sites. [Tags: Bloglines, Google, Subscription Services] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 36 Hits] EdNA has relaunched its website with a new interface and logo, sector portals, improved search, podcasts and an rss-to-javascript tool. It looks nice, and it's very easy to read, though I find the web-2.0-ish colour scheme very bland. "Find-Join-Connect' reminds me a lot of the tripartate navigation 'Knowledge-Learning-Community', but with shorter words. [Tags: Usability, Content Syndication, Portals, Navigation, EdNA, Podcasting] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]