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by Stephen Downes
August 7, 2008

Moving to Moodle: Reflections Two Years Later
This article is a lot more about change than it is about Moodle, especially because the transition was from an old non-standard in-house learning management system. Still, the article, a typical 'lessons learned' piece, is an informative read, and sketches some of the types of changes you might expect when changing technologies. More from the current issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly. Ining Tracy Chao, EDUCAUSE Quarterly, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, EDUCAUSE] [Comment]

NetDraw / UCINET Tutorial; Networks = Organizing
Interesting post with an intriguing challenge: "If you disagree, please send me a counterexample in the form of an organizing principle that does not invoke things (i.e., nodes) and relationships (i.e., links)." Well, now... how about piles of sand? People standing beside each other? Mist swirling around to form a cloud? Atoms? The solar system? (So what's happening here? If you think of 'link' as some kind of linguistic property, or a description of some relational quality (F(ab)) then, yes, everything can be described as 'things and relationships', and hence, as 'newtworks'. If, however, you think of a 'link' as something that must change the state of the second entity (as I do) then not everything is describable as a 'network'). I think of networks as an organizing principle, not the only one - which is how I can distinguish networks from other things (like, say, groups). Bruce Hoppe, Connectedness Blog, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Content Syndication, Quality] [Comment]

More Social Metadata: APML and ULML
Just what we needed, more acronyms. "APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile... ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services." These are both instances of what I would call 'second party metadata'. Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Web Services, Metadata] [Comment]

12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs
Dave Pollard's list is a little idealistic and a little irreverent (just like all his stuff, which is why I enjoy hos blog so much). "Cell Phones: Now let me get this straight: On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you're going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I'm going to put up with this why?" Um... yeah. there's going to have to be some convergence there. But guess which direction the service providers are betting on (hint: they are predicting the end of the desktop and the laptop). Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Wireless, Portable Computers, Web Logs] [Comment]

Presidents Who Blog
CAUT Universuity Affairs looks at the growing phenomenon of university presidents blogging and raises the question of whether they should. Well - of course they should - you exercise leadership by being audible and visible, not by hiding in an office. But of course, "Our legal counsel strongly advised me against doing it... The blog sometimes makes the folks here in central communications blanch a little, too." From my experience, it seems lawyers advise against everything. That makes them functionally useless. I would like to see lawyers more often advising how we can do things, not advising us that we shouldn't. Unattributed, CAUT University Affairs, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Experience, Leadership, Web Logs] [Comment]

Undeleted
Doc Searles's Wikipedia entry survives the threat of deletion and goes back to being merely a stub. My own Wikipedia entry survived a similar challenge, and now even has a table of contents. But the whole debate raises the question of Wikipedia's new unnamed army of enforcers - the people who don't add content, but who threaten articles with deletion, who demand citations from the print media, who complain that articles are not clear. I don't welcome this turn of events in Wikipedia, and fear that succumbing to the site's critics will ruin it. Doc Searles, Weblog, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Wikipedia] [Comment]

Dissent Deficit
I like to think that I bring the fine art of dissent to something like the mainstream, though of course my efforts pale compared to what mass media could do if it so desired. As this editorial notes, though, "Rather than engage speech that strays too far from the dangerously narrow borders of our public discourse, the gatekeepers of that discourse-our mass media-tend to effectively shout it down, marginalize it, or ignore it." Which is sad. Because most of the dominant narratives today are false and misleading, and hence need to be openly questioned. Via Contentious. The Editors, Columbia Journalism Review, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Join Storychasers
I had occasion to drop in on a video broadcast last night on the subject of the Storychasers project, an "educational collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists." Also mentioned in the broadcast was the Student Television Network, "made up of affiliate schools from coast to coast with an active interest in furthering scholastic broadcasting and video production." Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, August 7, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Video, Project Based Learning] [Comment]

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