OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
May 25, 2007

Stanley Cup Finals
Well I'm going to be in Holland all of next week and so will miss the whole thing. But it's something that has been a long time coming, and win or lose I want to wave the flag and be with the team. And I'll certainly be following the series. So here we go...

Go Sens Go

Bring Stanley home again

Various Authors, Website May 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Quebec Budget Released On USB Keys
When I first started at Assiniboine Community College in 1995 with a mandate to promote the use of the internet, I proved my point by emailing a full-text copy of the budget to everyone in the college who wanted it - while the budget was being read in the House of Commons. This is a tactic of the same ilk - the release of the Quebec budget on USB drives instead of paper. Not only does it cost a third what the paper version would cost, you can cut and paste information - and when you're done, you have some handy Flash memory that you can use, say, to put your resume on at that new job interview. Richard Akerman, Science Library Pad May 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Blogs As PLEs
I was asked in a recent comment what I thought the best PLE software was (this following my comments about Ecto). I was going going to say it hasn't been built yet, and to a certain degree this is true. But if I had to point someone to something that actually does exist, I'd probably say WordPress, with any number of the plug-ins. Why? Well as this post notes, in most VLEs information is "caged in". But a system like WordPress really allows you to get content in and out fairly efficiently. That's most of what we want from a PLE. But see also Tony Hirst on PLE as platform touting the Benefits of Facebook and Zoho Notes (which I also discussed recently). If I could have my own private versions of those (on that, see Steve O'Hear on Facebook as platform) - and not be forced to rely on their benevolent hosting - they would also be strong candidates. Emma Duke-Williams, Blogging IT and EDucation May 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Books] [Comment]

Dangerous Assumptions
The point of Wayne Hodgins's post (which as a happy side-effect introduces Erik Duval's blog (Erik, who is based at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, is president of the ARIADNE Foundation, technical editor for the (IEEE) standard on Learning Object Metadata, and coordinator of the work on learning objects, metadata and interoperability within the ProLearn Network of Excellence)) is this: "for the foreseeable future, I hope that we remain very aware of just how limited online searching is and that we continue to check our assumptions that 'everyone and everything is available online, otherwise they don't exist.'" I don't think anyone actually makes that assumption - the assertion that "if you're not online, you don't exist" is metaphorical. But also, there's a credibility issue. If you aren't online, how credible are you? If, especially, your domain is, say, online learning, and you're not online, how credible are you. Yes, as Hodgins says, a great deal of the world's information is not online. But that information - that is not instantly and freely available online - is increasingly and increasingly irrelevant. Because it is not credible. Wayne Hodgins, Off Course-On Target May 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Metadata, Web Logs, Learning Objects, Interoperability, Online Learning] [Comment]

834 Tips for Successful Online Instruction
Now available without subscriptions or registrations or anything creating a barrier between you and the 71 page PDF (which is how it should be) the -learning Guild's tips are short and oddly numbered but certainly good conversation-starters and doubtless contain nuggets of information for most readers. Interesting ad-supported model of distribution which, in this format, is no more annoying than a magazine (considerably less, actually). Various Authors, E-Learning Guild May 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Subscription Services, Online Learning] [Comment]

 

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