Stephen's Web

OLDaily

OLDaily is currently being produced by Barry Dahl (BD), Harold Jarche (HJ), and Gary Woodill (GW).

by Stephen Downes
July 2, 2008

Telepresence in the Flesh
Clive Shepard describes the experience of holding a meeting using a high-definition telepresence application, in this case, Cisco's Telepresence application. He says, "It's hard to convey how real this experience felt. We were talking to other Cisco employees in Paris and they might just as well have been in the room." A similar technology is the Halo Collaboration Studio by HP and Dreamworks. This is not cheap techology, but is the way of the future as travel becomes more expensive. -GW Clive Shepard, Clive on Learning, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Experience, Cisco] [Comment]

Proving the Potential of Virtual Worlds
I was part of a panel in Second Life on Monday, and what struck me was how it took place in a virtual lecture hall, and one by one, we all went up to the podium, showed some slides, and lectured to an audience of avatars seated in virtual chairs. We know how to bore you in a classroom, and now we know how to bore you online. I agree with this post by Matt Rhodes that "Second Life isn't the future of life online." It is a land of early adopters who love the technology, but are mostly using it as an analogue of what they would do in Real Life. Matt points to a company called RocketOn that "turns the entire web into a virtual world where your avatar travels with you." Perhaps we are starting to break the mold of old approaches using the newest technologies. Bertrand Russell said that "people like to die by the latest method." He could have been talking about Second Life. -GW Matt Rhodes, Business and Games: the Blog, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Second Life] [Comment]

A Bit More Education Techno-Twaddle; Why I Avoid NECC, 2008 Edition
Any time I see Techno-Twaddle in a post title I just have to read more. Here is a passionate alternate view of all the goodness that is NECC. Tabor explains why he isn't drawn to NECC and what parts he finds objectionable: "the sheer lack of intellectual diversity [a statement which will undoubtedly be criticized as inaccurate], the techno-fandom, the 100% Process/0% Content split will keep me away. If I wanted to sit on the floor with a notebook, I'd go to a Halo 3 LAN party." You don't want to miss the comments. Suffice it to say that the NECC attendees had plenty to say and Tabor responds to them all. -BD Matthew Tabor, Education for the Aughts, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Patents] [Comment]

Sakai and OpenSocial: A Different Approach to Distributed Learning Applications
This is a guest post over at Michael Feldstein's e-Literate by Dr. Ian Boston for the On the Horizon series. "Web development is simple, there are 100s of 1000s of web developers out there developing applications using whatever works for them. If we, in delivering applications for education create barriers to entry that prevent that army of developers from engaging we will lose the benefit of the powerhouse that is represented by the open source development community." Accordingly, they have transformed the Sakai interface based on the OpenSocial API and adopted a different development strategy. "Underneath, it is Sakai, operating as a data server, but ontop it is Gadgets, Widgets and Ajax applications delivered in HTML. We call this SData, where many of the concepts are borrowed from GData and other Google API's." -BD Ian Boston, e-Literate, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Google, Open Source] [Comment]

I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip
Luis Suarez, blogger, has had the report on his project on how to eliminate e-mail published in the NY Times. Having been up to my in-box with e-mail on a recent project, I can really relate to this worthwhile project. "THINK about whether my experience could work for you. Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes." Eliminating e-mail may be the best way to get better social media adoption in an organisation, and now we can refer to IBM as an example. -HJ Luis Suarez, New York Times, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Books, Networks, Experience, Project Based Learning, Spam] [Comment]

Lead the Charge?
Tony Karrer asks this month, "Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work [technological] literacies?". I have to agree that it would be a good thing if more learning professionals become conversant with social media in particular. However, I doubt that real change in organisations will come from a group who normally don't run the show. Management and leadership staff have to accept the change, and that is where learning professionals can help, by informing and supporting those at the top. -HJ Tony Karrer, Learning Circuits Blog, July 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Leadership] [Comment]

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