Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
November 6, 2007

OECD On Learning Networks
So the Red Hat up2date feature kicked in and knocked out my website, disabling all CGI functions with a security update to Perl. So that's how I spent my day. I would rather have had the chance to look more closely at the diagram from this post on OECD's description of learning networks (if only to have something 'official' to point my management to when I say I'm working on 'learning networks'). Anyhow, I'm off to Fredericton all day tomorrow, which means a late newsletter, if it arrives at all. John Connell, Weblog November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Networks, Security Issues] [Comment]

New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills
Robin Good has a real talent for taking a dull plain-text piece of content and presenting it in a way that is engaging and educational (when he's done some of my stuff in the past I've seen things in my own thought that I hadn't before). In this item, he takes the keynote presentation that Howard Rheingold delivered a couple of weeks ago to education.au and gives us a nice two-part version that is well worth looking at (I can't find Part II). Rheingold: "someone needs to educate children about the necessity for critical thinking and encourage them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." Via Link] [Tags: Video] [Comment]

Some Interesting Aussie Edubloggers
Jo McLeay subscribes to the changes at the Directory of Australian Edubloggers and decided to share "the gems I have been discovering." Read her descriptions of Karen Mann at Web2 Wanderings, Westley Field at Skoolaborate and iThought, Roland Gesthuizen at Plakboek, Linda Shardlow at First Person, Second Hand, Third Dimension and Kylie Willison at Blog blog blog. Jo McLeay, The Open Classroom November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Australia, Web Logs] [Comment]

Announcing Freefolio - a Social E-Portfolio
Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink have created and release, as open source, Freefolio, an e-portfolio system. "Why didn't we work with an existing system? We thought very hard about it. It seemed that many of the dedicated e-Portfolio systems were too restrictive. They started from an institutional definitions of what learning would be represents through the e-Portfolio. Others - like Mahara - seemed geared towards particular sectors in education." Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Open Source, E-Portfolios] [Comment]

Second Life: 20 Lessons
Interesting presentation that not only sketches the role of Second Life in learning but also maps it against a dozen or so other sites for features such as players' creative capacity or the site's emphasis on collaborative behaviour. Good links on this. There's a bit of a tendency to represent Second Life as the pinnacle of online virtual world achievement, but the observations are nonetheless worth a look. Via Pacific Rim Exchange. Jeremy Kemp, Slideshare November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Second Life] [Comment]

Elearning07 : Podcast Downloads
Very nice. "Thanks to the superhuman efforts of Robyn Jay and Stephan Ridgway over the weekend we now have the complete recording from all panels at Elearning07." That adds up to something like 50 podcasts from different topic-based teams looking at topics ranging from "how contemporary e-learning methodologies challenge the status quo" to "digital literacy skills" to "using social networking spaces to engage youth." Alexander Hayes, NSW LearnScope Blog and Podcast November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Networks, Podcasting] [Comment]

Self-Assessment Sheet
Go to this Flickr site for the blog self-assessment worksheet. Stay for the images of the student blogs (follow the images in the 'teachandlearn' set, right). Via Emma Duke-Williams. Konrad Glogowski, Flickr November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr, Web Logs] [Comment]

How the Internet On Cable Became the Internet As Cable
With the launch of YouTube in Canada, featuring the CBC (television) and CFL (football), and the launch of the USC Channel, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the way "internet service providers, and cultural groups steadily move toward the delivery of content online that bears a striking resemblance to the conventional cable model." What characterizes the cable model is not only channels and bundles, but also barriers and borders. "The new Daily Show site," for example, "is off-limits for Canadians since the U.S.-based Comedy Central recently took the unprecedented step of redirecting Canadian visitors to the CTV-owned Comedy Network site." I find it ironic that it is business interests - who are always the first to caterwaul against government interference in markets - that are leading this charge to clamp down, control, and ultimately impose a wide range of content controls over the internet. Michael Geist, Weblog November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Video, Canada, YouTube] [Comment]

Creativity Panel
Video of the very interesting panel we held on creativity at the AECT confrence in Anaheim, including my own presentation. The files are MP4s and load pretty quickly (they're short). Various Authors, AECT November 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Video] [Comment]

 

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