Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
September 30, 2008

Portugal Unveils 500,000 Cheap Computers for Schools
Well - here is a country that can afford to provide laptops for all of its students. Portugal. "The government's educational technology plan aims to make Portugal one of the top five most technologically advanced countries in Europe," it said. Prime Minister Jose Socrates and members of his cabinet handed out the first 5,000 computers at schools across the country on Sept. 23. Via eSchool News. Reuters, Yahoo News, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Portable Computers, European Union] [Comment]

Popular Online Videos Teach Crafty Ways to Cheat On Tests
"I don't think any of my teachers go to YouTube." Famous last words from a student posting instructions on how to cheat. Jeff Young, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Video, YouTube] [Comment]

What Do You Most Want To Learn More About? [Poll Results]
Interesting results from the readership of Sue Waters' edublogs weblog. Using blogs with students: 41 percent. Developing personal learning networks: 3.3 percent. I would imagine the readership of this website would offer a different response. And, I wonder what the student response would be. Sue Waters, The Edublogger, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Web Logs] [Comment]

Institutional Repositories and the Costs Of Doing It Right
Brian Kelly should probably have put 'right' in quotes. Because he is responding to the perverse situation in which doing it 'right' makes it institutional repository work too expensive to do at all. "It strikes me as being somewhat disingenuous to have developed an approach which is known to be resource-intensive and then to make a plea for additional resources in order for the particular approach to be effective. A more honest approach would have been to develop a solution which was better suited for the available resources." can't say I disagree. Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Learning Object Repositories] [Comment]

Million Laptop Movements by OLPC and Intel
In a nutshell, "Both One Laptop Per Child and Intel are now moving into million-unit sales numbers for their respective 4P Computers, the XO laptop and the Classmate PC." Which means that, despite the hurdles, there is still something to these initiatives. See also Tom Hoffman on the XO and Sugar. Wayan Vota, One Laptop Per Child News, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Portable Computers] [Comment]

The Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF)
Why oh why oh why does Mohamed Amine Chatti come up with a new name for what is basically just an interation on the pre-existing concept of the personal learning Envrionment. For the people who coined and started plugging "personal learning Networks" I could tell it was just self-promotion. But what's the explanation here? The copyright notives, "2008 Copyright © Informatik 5?" *sigh* "In contrast to traditional LMS-driven e-learning solutions, a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) takes a more natural and learner-centric approach and is characterized by the freeform use of a set of lightweight services and tools that belong to and are controlled by individual learners." Mohamed Amine Chatti, Weblog, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Personal Learning Environment, Copyrights, Patents] [Comment]

On the Three Parts of Open Education
OK, I think D'Arcy Norman has hit a new low in video quality. Even so, he hits on a good point, talking about the three parts of open education: open content, open access, and open assesstment. We've had the pioneering efforts of OpenCourseWare and related initiatives to create open content. The open courses ofered by david Wiley, Alec Couros, and george Siemens and myself have paved the way to open access. As for open assessment - well, I've commented on it before, and I'm sure many people are looking at models even now.David Wiley comments, "This disaggregation is already happening, and higher education will just pull itself apart faster and faster in the future." D'Arcy Norman, Weblog, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Assessment, Connectivism, Video, Open Content, OpenCourseWare, Open Access, Push versus Pull] [Comment]

Twitter Mass Follow - Nevermind : eLearning Technology
Tony Karrer samples the messages from the edubloggers' combined Twitter feed (mentioned here yesterday) and says "Thanks, but no thanks." Tony Karrer, eLearning Technology, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Twitter] [Comment]

I Think I'm Legally Required to Post About This State of the Blogosphere / 2008
Many people are reporting on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Report. I personally don't think much of it, not when I look at Technorati's coverage of my own site, and see this mess - the fourth 'freshest' link dating "14152 days ago". My ranking bounces up and down 1000 places in a day, which represents wild swings of 25 percent or more. The results for my name are no better. It is not plausible to believe my name was mentioned only once in the entire blogosphere yesterday (or even only four times today) - certainly not when I myself saw more references than that just in the blogs in our Connectivism course. And it returns 140 results for the CCK08 tag, which is utterly ridiculous. Maybe if we used "Technorati Tags" we'd be better represented in the listings. Mark Oehlert, e-Clippings, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Connectivism, Technorati, Web Logs] [Comment]

The Business Model and Its Discontents
It's not clear any more - as though it ever was - that we should want to run educational institutions like a business. "Eli Broad-who has done so much to promote the adoption of business models in the public schools-has given Harvard University $44 million to establish an 'Educational Innovation Laboratory' at Harvard... the purpose of the Broad research laboratory at Harvard is to continue the Broad Foundation's campaign to bring business methods to the schools. What a strange irony that this would occur at the very time that our financial system teeters on the brink of disaster!" Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, September 30, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Research] [Comment]

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