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OLDaily

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

by Stephen Downes
July 3, 2008

Failures Lead to Success
"I recall a staff developer once telling of a chemical company that would call all its employees out to the front lawn to surround a cannon whenever someone tried something new and failed. The boss would set off the cannon to celebrate that we are one step closer to success." Pete Reilly urges educators to create environments where it's safe and acceptable to make mistakes in a post republished from the Institute for Learning Centered Education. Good advice. In business I've learned much more from failure than success. -HJ Pete Reilly, Ed Tech Journeys, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Social Media Disasters (or How Not Having a Social Media Strategy Can Hurt)
The power of social media is shown in the problem that a company can have when one negative piece of publicity get multiplied millions of times. Even though an allegation may not be true, or even if the company corrects the problem, the negative publicity can circulate for years. The rules of PR have changed, and companies may need to invest time and effort in the same social media channels as those who are circulating the negative publicity about them. For sure, ignoring the problem won't fix it. -GW Augie Ray, socialmediatoday, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Videogames In Libraries Increase Readership
When the Internet first came together, way back in the 1980s (remember FidoNet, Usenet and Bitnet?), one of the most progressive groups in embracing the new technologies was librarians. Library bulletin boards were a good source of ideas and innovative practices. In the same spirit, the American Library Association is urging its members to install videogames in libraries nationwide, in order to attract hard to reach users. It seems to be working. -GW John Rice, Educational Games Research, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: United States, Video] [Comment]

Making a Difference? The Effect of Teach for America On Student Performance in High School
The Teach for America program uses top recruits top college graduates without formal teacher training to teach in poorly performing public schools. Even though these recruits are assigned to "the most demanding classrooms", their students do better than those from classrooms with fully trained teachers with three or more years of experience. What does this say about the efficacy of teacher training? -GW Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, Colin Taylor, Urban Institute, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Experience] [Comment]

K12 Online - Do It Anyway!
This short post begs the question of why do they accept and reject session proposals for an online conference? Good question. Sure, they need to invite a few keynotes or featured presentations or the like, but after that why not allow anyone with something to say the cyberspace to say it in. Seems to me that they could easily use a Digg-like rating system to direct people to the most popular contributions while allowing everyone to be a contributor. "This is one of the great things about being online where anyone can have a space and a voice." Yes, as long as we allow it and enable it. -BD Clarence Fisher, Remote Access, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Mortgage Crisis Project - How Do You Manage so Much Complexity? Ning!
"How do we ourselves learn how to work in a more collaborative way? How do all of us learn the essence of Social Media?" These are Rob Paterson's questions as he works with KETC Public TV to create a place where people can learn about surviving the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. In an earlier post, Rob shows the barriers, "They don't know where the safe help is. They are surrounded by sharks waiting to feed off them. They are often frozen by shame and fear." This project is still in early development but is proceeding quickly. Finally we are seeing examples of social media being used for tangible social benefits. -HJ Robert Paterson, Robert Paterson's Weblog, July 3, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Video, Project Based Learning, Web Logs] [Comment]

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