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by Stephen Downes
April 15, 2008

Leading Ahead of the Curves
Good summary of closing remarks given by Brad Wheeler at the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference. Wheeler looks at the 'curves' ahead: "Can our actions substantively affect the shape of the curves or do we just adapt as they are revealed?" I have always believed that we make our future through the decisions that we make, that nothing is inevitable, that nothing is set in stone. So when Wheeler talks about the coming influence of open educational resources, I think of the need for each of us to continue pressing that vision in order to make it happen. Lida L. Larsen, EDUCAUSE Connect, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: EDUCAUSE] [Comment]

What Students Might Need to Do Well As They Leave School.
K.W. Hobbes (or whatever - why on earth don't people put their name on their blog posts, nice and clear and easy to see?) lists what he (she?) thinks students should know as they leave school. I covered this subject a while back in Things You Really Need To Learn but we can always bemnefit from more discussion of this. K.W. Hobbes, Educational Discourse, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Web Logs] [Comment]

Http://Www.Pontydysgu.Org/2008/04/What-Is-the-Difference-Between-an-E-Portfolio-and-a-Personal-Learning-Environment/
As I;m going to be at the e-portfolio conference in Montreal in May, this question is directly relevant to me as well. Attwell writes, "An e-Portfolo is a` place for reflection, for recognising learning and presenting that learning. A PLE may be seen as a tool (or set of tools) for not only presenting learning but for also (individually or collectively) developing a representation of wider knowledge sets (ontologies?)." See also this video from Attwell on 'the new industrial revolution'. Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Ontologies, Video, Semantic Web, Paradigm Shift, E-Portfolios] [Comment]

Course Management System Content Conversion Tools Wikipage
Scott Leslie, after all the appropriate caveats, announces that he has put together a wiki page to collect all the CMS content export and conversion tools he can find. You are invited to contribute. Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Content Management Systems] [Comment]

OGC KML
This is nice news. KML, the markup language used by Google Earth, has been recognized as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Via Bryan Alexander. Various Authors, Open Geospatial Consortium, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Google] [Comment]

The Personal Research Portal: the Virtual Faculty or the Net Behind the Classroom
There's some interesting stuff here, not the least of which is the elegant use of FreeMind to create materials for this online seminar (try clicking on the bubbles). The intent of this presentation "...is to shift out of the spotlight and focus on the 'hidden' practices of education, to stress on all the tasks that happen outside the classroom - be it of bricks and mortar or virtual - before or when designing a subject or teaching it to the students, what happens after that teaching, etc." MP3 audio or Elliminate recording. Ismael Pena-Lopez, ICTlogy, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Audio] [Comment]

Three RIF Working Drafts Published
From the W3C: "The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group published three drafts today: RIF Basic Logic Dialect (RIF-BLD), RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (RIF-FLD) and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility (RIF-RDF-OWL). These drafts help solidify the 'pure logic rules' branch of RIF, which is distinct from the 'production rules' branch (on which a Working Draft is expected within the next 6 months)." This takes me back to my predicate calculus days. Ugh. I can't say the W3C formulation makes things clearer (much less human readable) - and I can't say that I think the use of ^^ as a frequently used notation was well thought out. Various Authors, W3C, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Resource Description Framework, Books] [Comment]

Knowledge Mechanics and Its Temporal Nature
OK, I should begin by saying that my approach to the subject of 'knowledge' is very different from the authors'. But with that said, I found this to be an interesting paper that stimulated some new ideas. One of which was this: all knowledge is tacit. This is probably something I should have said before. So what, then, is 'explicit knowledge' (as the authors use the term and as we see it elsewhere). It is, to me, a codification of knowledge, at best, an approximation or an abstraction of knowledge. 'Explicit knowledge' is constituted of the feeble scratchings we make to signify the richness of the understandings we have in our head. Ramesh Singh and Sharad Jain, Ubiquity, April 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

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