November 23, 2006
OLDaily
[link: 2 Hits] in short, "the experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes." [Tags:
Wikipedia] [
Comment] [
Edit] [
Delete] [
Spam]
[link: 5 Hits] Interesting. "The Academy is a hands on, collaborative training center for people interested in learning how to produce and host live, interactive webcasts. You can learn more about The Webcast Academy here." What's kind of weird is that instead of posting the learning material in some easily accessible format, they have regular meetings (called 'classes') that you have to attend at certain times. Don't know what that's about; it certainly isn't very user-friendly. And why oh why would they make the section headings out of Flash? Don't they know that messes up your scrolling, accessibility and usability? Via
Emma Duke-Williams. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Usability,
Accessibility,
Academics and Academia] [
Comment] [
Edit] [
Delete] [
Spam]
[link: Hits] His comments on group work, he says, "follow him around." I'm not surprised. Questioning group work is like questioning the Pope. Glogowski reports on some parent and student reactions to group work, including a memo from the principal to all staff pointing out "some students feel that they are 'left out,' 'stuck with,' or 'looked past' during group work. Many of these kids have other social stresses to deal with. Can we all please make every effort to alleviate this stress during class time?" People continue to say group work sometimes benefits students. I don't deny that. But I will argue that its use cannot be justified unless it can be known that it does not produce harm. But there is, sadly, no "do no harm" principle in education. There should be. [Tags:
Children and Child Learning] [
Comment] [
Edit] [
Delete] [
Spam]
[link: Hits] This is a great paper. The discussion is directed toward the use of links within a social network to detect a potential conflict of interest. This would help editors select reviewers for journal articles (OK, so the authors are still rooted in the old world - let it go). Two networks,
FOAF and the
bibliographic literature in Computer Science research, are used. What we get in this paper is a nice series of steps (and cool diagram) that characterize such semantic analyses:
1. Obtaining high quality data
2. Data preparation
3. Entity disambiguation
4. Metadata and ontology representation
5. Querying and inference techniques
6. Visualization
7. Evaluation
It's interesting to see just how many real and potential conflicts of interest appear among the authors. Via
New Scientist. [Tags:
Project Based Learning,
Cool,
Research,
Networks,
Semantic Web,
Ontologies,
Quality] [
Comment] [
Edit] [
Delete] [
Spam]
Projects&Collaborations
Browse through the thousands of links in my knowledge base
sorted according to topic category, author and
publication.
Research
Browse through the thousands of links in my knowledge base
sorted according to topic category, author and
publication.
About Me
Bio, photos, and assorted odds and ends.
Publications
You know, the ones that appear in refereed journals of Outstanding Rank.
Presentations
Lectures, seminars, and keynotes in a wide variety of
formats - everything from streaming video to rough notes.
Articles
All my articles, somewhere around 400 items dating from 1995.
Audio
Audio recordings of my talks recorded in MP3 format. A podcast feed is also available.
Calendar
What I'm doing, where I'm doing it, and when.
Photos
Newly updated! A collection of my photographs. Suitable
for downloading as desktop wallpaper.
Stephen's Web
Since 1995
About this Site
Why this site exists, what it does, and how it works.
OLDaily
Edu_RSS
FOAF
OLDaily Audio
OPML
About the Author
Stephen Downes
Copyright 2006 Stephen Downes
National Research Council Canada
Contact: stephen@downes.ca
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License
.
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.
This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward. - Stephen Downes