Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
March 8, 2007

OpenID: a Step Forward for E-Learning Standards
Another call to pay attention to OpenID, this time explicitly as an education standard. "It is time for e-learning developers to cast their vote for OpenID by employing it actively in the products and services that they are developing." Mark Burton, Edugator March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

About E-Journals: Archving and Preservation
Briefing article on journal article archiving and preservation writtn from a predominately British point of view. As the article notes, "a systematic approach to the issue of ensuring continued access to licensed e-journals has remained elusive." The report looks at the role of institutional and open access repositories and considers current e-journal archiving options. This seems right: "there needs to be a range of options for ensuring long-term preservation and access of the world's scholarly e-journals. No single service can hope to comprehensively cover the full range of titles." Maggie Jones, JISC March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

Canadian Schools
Some nice writing describing the work of Darren Kuropatwa and Clarence Fisher - "two Manitoba-based teachers who started as active bloggers with the goal of connecting with educators worldwide. Now they've taken what they know to the classroom, leveraging a raft of tools such as GoogleDocs, Thinkfree, Writely, iRows.com, YouTube, iTunes and other web-based multimedia-type freebies to create new learning environments." Via Darren Kuropatwa, who has had a good day (nice to hear). Denise Deveau, CBC March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

LG Licenses ContentGuard's Patent Portfolio
LG has officially gone over to the dark side as it takes out a license for ContentGuard's digital rights management (DRM) 'technology'. What the move more accurately signals, probably, is a desire for closer relations with the companies that own ContentGuard, including Microsoft, Time Warner and Thomson. This article is eager to argue how smart the deal is for both LG and ContentGuard. While it does indeed signal the end of a very long drough for ContentGuard (which has gone nowhere trying to get royalties from the Open Mobile Alliance, which uses the Open Digital Rights Language), it is rather less so for LG, which now needs to convince others to agree to pay for licensing or else work at a disadvantage. Bill Rosenblatt, DRM Watch March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

How E-Learning Works
E-Learning as it was understood in 1999, complete with a pseudo-theory about tired neurons. It's not a bad article, as these articles go, and it does represent what is probably the mainstream. But it's interesting to note that the example (the scuba diver simulation) is no way resembles the description (a typical online class) which in turn does not resemble the way the author is actually conveying information (a page-turner type article). We need to ask, why would someone be simulating scuba-diving in the first place, what are the intentions of someone who writes a course, and why do online articles help people learn even when the theory says they shouldn't? Via Kerry Trabinger of the (Australian) Networks Forum, who also links to How to Make E-Learning Work by Elise Zito and Building a Successful E-Learning Stragegy by Derek Stockley. Lee Ann Obringer, How Stuff Works March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

Giant Zero Journalism
Doc Searles captures the shifting sands of journalism in this post. "We don't just 'deliver information' like it's a Fedex package. We inform each other. That is, we literally form what other people know. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I'm changed by that. I am not merely in receipt of a box of facts. I am enlarged by knowing more than I did before. Enlarging each other is the deepest calling of journalism, whether it's done by bloggers, anchors or editors." Quite right. Via Amy Gahran Doc Searles, Weblog March 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]

 

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