December 14, 2006
OLDaily
[link: Hits]
PowrePoint Slides and
MP3 Audio (my side only) of a presentation I gave this afternoon, as pictured above, from my home using Centra. I used a working draft of an article I'm writing on network learning and personal learning environments. [Tags:
E-Learning 2.0,
Personal Learning Environment,
Networks,
Web 2.0,
Podcasting,
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[link: 5 Hits] Dave Pollard reviews George Siemens's
Knowing Knowledge and gives it a pretty good write-up - mostly. "Although his prescription is, I think, impractical, his vision of an organization that enables effective knowledge-sharing, learning and collaboration is worth thinking about." [Tags: ] [
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[link: Hits] Chris Anderson gives the upsides and risks of six principles of open publishing: "All staff edit their own personal 'about' pages; Show what we're working on; Share the reporting as it happens; Give comments equal status to the story they're commenting on; Let readers decide what's best; Wikifiy everything." I do some of these, and not others. I am pretty open about process. As for comments, I allow then, anonymously, even, but when it comes down to it I figure readers can post comments in their own blog, just like me. Same with deciding what's best and wikifying. I don't need to 'let' readers to this, they can do it on their own (and I provide the RSS feed and licensing to enable it). Of course, I don't publish a magazine, either. Hm, maybe I should... Via
Scott Karp. [Tags:
Open Access,
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[link: Hits] According to this article, "It looks like the education space could be the first, real place where Linux could grab beachhead in the desktop PC market." Though teachers and administrators have more experience with Windows, students don't have the same history, and when it comes down to paying for software out of their own pocket, they will opt for Linux. [Tags:
Online Learning,
Microsoft,
Experience] [
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[link: Hits] From the Ascilite conference: "Roger Atkinson, Catherine McLoughlin, Grainne Conole and John Hedberg pointed aspiring researchers-looking-to-be published in the right direction to get published and to gain those all important DEST points, citations, and all the other measurables..." Of colurse, what I liked was this: "But what is the publishing of the future, who is going to double blind referee the Stephen Downes' blogs? will bloggers get DEST points, and what of collaborative publishing...?" [Tags:
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[link: 1 Hits] In this article, [author] presents an [article type] on [technology type]. The point of the article is [conclusion]. This is similar to something I said in [previous article], which of course [is now|is not] mainstream. [Edublogger] once also said [comment], but was [wrong|deluded]. In my opinion, [author] is right when [he|she] says [something I said], but misses the point when [he|she] says [something I never thought of]. [Tags: ] [
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[link: Hits] Another fine version of this list created by Clayton Wright with maybe a hundred conferences listed (with links). Available as
HTML or
MS-Word Doc. [Tags: ] [
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[link: Hits] Seb sent me this URL to a video describing a project where 30 students from schools in South Yorkshire joined staff, doctors and engineers to work in Malealea in Lesotho. This is the place
I visited when I was in the country, and it is really something to see all these familiar scenes again. [Tags:
Project Based Learning,
Schools,
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[link: Hits] Some pretty good funding is available in Britain for Web 2.0 and OpenID in Britain, courtesy of Eduserv. Deadline January 29. Via Bee on TALO. [Tags:
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[link: Hits] I commented not long ago on an article from the NY Times on education in India. Here's an Indian perspective: "It is the poor rural children, thousands of them, who paid for my education by losing their opportunity to become semi-literate. The system is tilted against them and unless there is a radical change in the way that education is funded, they will continue to pay the price for subsidizing the US for decades to come." Be sure to see the
rest of the blog for commentary on the false bottom of the pyramid, scepticism about the OLPC (0ne laptop per child) project, and the high cost of connectivity in India. Via Education-India. [Tags:
Web Logs,
Project Based Learning,
Portable Computers,
Children and Child Learning,
Ontologies] [
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[link: Hits] I have never been a big supporter of peer review, including that undertaken to evaluate approve publicly funded programs. I am not, though, particularly keen on the touted replacement, "statistical indicators, such as the number of postgraduate students in a department and the amount of money a department brings in through its research." I don't think human judgment should be replaced by statistics - but I do want to increase the number and broaden the range of the humans doing the judging. In fairness, I will note that Steven Harnad, who posted this item to the JISC list, criticizes the RAE process as "re-review" and argues in favour of metrics, as evidenced
here and
here. [Tags:
Research,
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)] [
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Projects&Collaborations
Browse through the thousands of links in my knowledge base
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Research
Browse through the thousands of links in my knowledge base
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publication.
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Stephen Downes
Copyright 2006 Stephen Downes
National Research Council Canada
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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