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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 10, 2008

The Competitive Imperative of Learning
There is not a lot of critical or analytical writing on learning in the business press, so this article by Amy Ednondson is an important one. She makes the distinction between Execution-as-Efficiency and Execution-as-Learning. The implications of the article are that workers need to be free to learn as they work, not to take orders or courses in order to learn. An important shift in thinking in the corporate world. -GW Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business Review, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Blogging Research: Attribution and Ownership of Ideas
Lilia Efimova discusses the challenges around attribution in a cloudy, bloggy world. "It is not easy to find to whom and how to credit when one's ideas are inspired by reading weblogs of others and conversations in a weblog network. When those ideas leave the blogosphere and take shape of something that is part of paid work (publications, presentations, instruments, methods), lack of attribution could result in a bitter feelings as sharing one's ideas for a "collective good" is not the same as giving them to someone who might be competing for a publication space or consulting assignments in the "real world"." Of course, these issues will become common ground for academics and businesses as we continue to connect and network and learn online. -HJ Lilia Efimova, Mathemagenic, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Academia, Web Logs] [Comment]

Why Educational Change Is Hard
Lehmann looks at how some of the principles in Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" can be applied to facilitating change in schools, as well as the limitations of his examples as applied to education. "So there are a couple of questions that we can examine through Shirkey's lens, then... first, why is it that schools are so hard to transform using these tools when commerce (for instance) has been so easy to change? And second, what has to happen within the community of folks -- loose as it may be -- who care about the notion of 21st Century schools." Lehmann proposes that part of that problem is that schools have a high cost of failure when compared to many of Shirky's examples of how new social media enables small businesses and individuals to take a chance whereas those with enormous institutional infrastructures are less inclined due to a higher cost of failure. All told, this is a very thoughtful analysis of what can be done regarding all of the angst being expressed in the education blogosphere about the slow rate of change in education. Hat tip to a post by Will and a tweet from Britt. -BD Chris Lehmann, Practical Theory - A View from the Classroom, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Twitter, Online Learning, Books, Web Logs] [Comment]

Build His Network Now To Set Him Free Later
It used to be that wealthy parents sent their children to expensive schools so that they could interact in the best social circles. Christian Long gives this a new, and much cheaper, twist by thinking about his son's future network and how parents can help by developing their own learning networks. "... he'll be guaranteed a world-class network of dynamic: mentors; research buddies; teachers of every ilk/curiosity/expertise; virtual learning adventure cohorts; and surrogate 'uncles'/'aunts'." I'll be interested in Beckett's take on this when he starts blogging. -HJ Christian Long, Think: Lab, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Networks, Research, Mentors and Mentoring, Web Logs] [Comment]

Campus-Wide Switch to New E-Mail, Calendar Service Begins
Stanford University is going to Zimbra, thereby joining the likes of UCLA, Ohio State University, and Georgia Tech in using the collaboration suite. They will be phasing out their Webmail and Sundial (Oracle Calendar) services over the next few months. "Zimbra was selected because the technology allows access to e-mail, calendar and contact lists from a single, unified web interface-enabling easy sharing of information among the various services, according to Ammy Hill, campus readiness specialist for IT Services. She added that Zimbra is an open-source, standards-based solution that works equally well on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems." -BD , Stanford Report, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Apple Inc., Operating Systems, Microsoft] [Comment]

A Service-Oriented Virtual Learning Environment
This is a guest post by Andrew G. Booth and Brian P. Clark for On the Horizon series on distributed learning. "Our position in the learning environment debate can be summarised by the following statement. As well as students being able to create their custom learning environments, we believe that it is important that teachers, too, are able to create their custom teaching environments." As an alternative to the current crop of monolithic VLE, "we are currently developing a Service-Oriented Virtual Learning Environment (SOVLE) that is composed of a set of pluggable resources that have Web application front ends and Web service back ends." More info about the "we are developing" piece would be appreciated. How far along is this project? Will this be open source or open architecture or not open at all? Will non-geek faculty be able to handle and navigate this environment? -BD Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, July 10, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Open Source, Project Based Learning] [Comment]

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