Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
May 3, 2007

Presentations
I had expected to be on a flight on my way to Bahrain at this very moment, however, my conference was postponed. I am still due to speak in London on May 10th and to be at CADE in Winnipeg the following week, though as the paperwork hasn't arrived I'm on tenterhooks. I have been working overtime all week getting the list of my presentations prepared in order to satisfy a different set of paperwork. I was half way through this project when I had to move my site a few months ago, getting all of my presentations into the database. These pages display links to the slides and audio as well as to a slide how player (from Slideshares) and a (mostly nonfunctioning) audio player. I'll be inserting photos and video into those pages as well. Any suggestions on how to improve this display would be welcome. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Project Based Learning, Video, Audio] [Comment]

Education Reform
I am not normally attributed with great economy of words, but that's how I'm feeling just now. In response to this post on education reform, I posted a comment. It was short, and I didn't even post it in my blog (I guess I will now). Tom Haskins analyzed my comment and responded with four separate posts drawing out the themes of my response:
- Sizing up the opposition
- Winning without a battle
- Conflicting educations
- No new change required
Tom Haskins, growing changing learning creating May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Web Logs] [Comment]

Blog Growth Stalling: Some Reasons Why I Nearly Quit Blogging
According to Technorati, the growth of the blogosphere has stalled at about 14 million active blogs. People still start blogging, then quit. This post offers some reasons why. I would add a generalized category of 'retribution' to the list. This is what you get if you use your real name. Even if your employer doesn't discipline or fire you, your future job prospects are impacted. Via Beth Kanter. Jason Kaneshiro, Webomatica May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Web Logs, Ontologies] [Comment]

74 Quality Ruby On Rails Resources and Tutorials
Rich McIver sends along this resource. I'm familiar with a number of the tutorials listed. Some of them are a but out of date (Ruby and Rails have gone through rapid version changes, an artifact of development). Others I looked at today and look useful. The How to Install for many many different operating systems seems especially useful. Unattributed, software developer May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Ruby, Operating Systems] [Comment]

Games-Based Learning; a Serious Business Application
Good white paper covering game-based learning in some detail. I like the author's approach: "Games-Based learning isn't about using simplistic 'Pong' or 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' as a means to teach people raw facts. That was the approach that edutainment took and which by and large failed." There's a longish list of links to other white papers on p. 6 and a large number of examples, with screen shots, near the end of the paper. Via Networks. Kevin Corti, PIXElearning May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

 

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