Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
June 20, 2008

The OLDaily Summer Edition
OK, this is it, last post time. I am going to be gone for the next four weeks, and in my place I have three intrepid bloggers stepping in: Barry Dahl, Harold Jarche, and Gary Woodill.

Barry Dahl serves as the Vice President of Technology and the e-Campus at Lake Superior College (LSC) inDuluth, MN. Harold Jarche hjas "found a passion in the area of sharing, learning, reflecting and collaborating using new Web tools such as social network systems, blogs and wikis" and runs his own consulting company in Sackville, NB. Gary Woodill is Director of Research and Analysis at Brandon Hall Research, where he monitors and writes about emerging learning technologies. He lives with his wife and three poodles near a lake in Gores Landing, Ontario.

Please give them a nice welcome, and pass on my thanks. Oh - and I will post from time to time during the four weeks, as I will be speaking at three conferences in Spain and by videoconference to one conference in Wisconsin. But, for now - bye. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Conferencing, Networks, Video, Web Logs] [Comment]

CCK08: A Model for the Future of Education
Links related tyo our course on connective knowledge. "Are you a lifelong learner? Where do you do your continual learning? Is it important for like-minded learners to connect with one another?" Rodd Lucier, Teacher 2.0, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Mainstream Media Vs. Blogosphere: Mainstream Ed Vs. Edublogosphere?
OK, this is a nice sentiment: "Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see... It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context." Well, sure. But here's the condition on the other side: there needs to be something to link to. What Associated Press fails to recognize in its recent campaign against cut-and-paste blogging is that this was the only way for many readers to see the story at all - the rest was behind a subscription wall. And the same is true in education, indeed, even more so. Education bloggers can play nice with commercial media - but only if commercial media plays nice with its readers. Which means open access. Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Subscription Services, Open Access, Web Logs] [Comment]

Don'T Cry When Social Media Flops, Just Move On
Quite right. And this is, I must say, the sentiment that keeps me from getting too excited about some things in the first place. Been there, done that. What service is failing this time? Twitter. "So while I flipped a big giant bird at twitter for yanking a service for fuzzy reasons, what can I do? Punt." Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Twitter] [Comment]

Next Generation Learning/Course Management Systems: New JOLT Issue
I want to keep a note on this, so I have it handy for future presentations. It is a reference to a special issue of JOLT on next generation LMS technology. Bryan Alexander, Liberal Education Today, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Agrega, the New Educational Digital Object Platform
I am leaving for Spain on Sunday, which makes this announcement relevant (and it will probably be a topic of discussion at the Madrid conference). "Agrega, a new educational initiative promoting internet in the classroom, is a collaborative effort on the part of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Social Politics and Sports, Red.es, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, and the Autonomous Communities and Autonomous Cities of Spain (CC.AA). Agrega is Spain's new educational digital object platform, 'which consists of a central repository and other autonomous repositories which have educational content for non-university level centres.'" Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Learning Object Repositories] [Comment]

Paper Rights Management
So when you buy a book, do you ever doubt your right to resell it as a used book? Of course not. But publishers - smacking their lips with greed - have begun top change that. This example is from Springer. Dan Lockton, Architectures of Control, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Books] [Comment]

MooTools 1.2: It's Official!
I still think JavaScript frameworks will only increase in importance. Hence, I'm linking to this release of MooTools (I've been following its development over the last few months). See also: spiced up embedded Javascript. Michelle, MooTools the Blog, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Linking and Deep Linking] [Comment]

Gaining and Losing Literacy Skills Over the Lifecourse
Following up from my recent discussion of literacy, Nadine Valk, from the canadian Council on Learning, provided links to two studies, this one, which described how adults lose skills as they get older, and another Stats Can study showing the distribution of literacy levels across the population. Various Authors, Statistics Canada, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Adult Learning] [Comment]

The Seoul Declaration
In the email: "A diverse group of civil society groups have worked on a joint Civil Society Declaration to the OECD 2008 Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy, which is currently taking place here, in Seoul. It raises a number of issues of major importance to the civil society community and makes a number of recommendations to move us towards the future of the Internet that meets the essential needs of all the world's citizens." PDF. Maybe we should forward the bit about balanced copyright to the government. Various Authors, Declaration, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Copyrights, Patents] [Comment]

Search Over Collected OER Sites
Tony Hirst writes, "I put together a simple Google custom search engine that will search over the domains you link to from this post (in fact, that are linked to from the printer friendly version of the post)." Tony Hirst, Google Custom Search, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Google] [Comment]

Free Online Courses From Great Universities
More open learning opportunities - audiocasts from famous universities. Various Authors, Website, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Audio] [Comment]

Clickers, Pedagogy and Edtechtainment
This post caught my eye particularly because during the past several months I've become a bit of a clicker guy, much to my own surprise. This Inside Higher Ed author asks "Are we fostering an educational environment in which technology supersedes scholarship, an academy dominated by edtechtainment - pedagogy by gimmickry?" Fair question, although the article is not exactly fair and balanced. I don't think he would have needed to look very far to find an educator with an alternate view of using clickers in the classroom. Sure, they're not for everybody, and they should be used wisely and sparingly, but since when is that news? (BD) Alan Groveman, Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

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