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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
January 19, 2009

Gaming Trends
Slide presentation viewable in Slideshare. I love the images in this presentation and also found the summary of major trends to be useful. A big change: the changing age demographics (explainable by gamers growing up), the impact of the Wii, the ubiquity of gaming, the shift of games from the bedroom to the living room, connected gaming, and much more. Via Muhammad Sabri Sahrir Jerome Sudan , Slideshare, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Wii, Online Learning] [Comment]

The Educational Audio and Video Library
Links to a wide variety of open educational resources from various audio and video sources, including audio books, university courses, foreign language lessons and educational YouTube collections. Dan Colman, Open Culture, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Audio, Video, YouTube] [Comment]

Not Your Grandpa'S Blog
According to the EDUCAUSE Connect page, the authors of this ELI session blog include Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, Cole W. Camplese and James Groom. That makes for quite a serssion, and an entertaining blog. Here's part of the session description: "In a series of lightning talks, the presenters will share work at their respective organizations that they believe to be useful to others in the teaching and learning community." Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, Cole W. Camplese and James Groom, EDUCAUSE Connect, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: RSS, Learning Communities, Online Learning Communities, EDUCAUSE, Web Logs] [Comment]

Aluka: Building a Digital Library of Scholarly Resources From and About Africa
Ignatia writes, "Since 2008 Aluka has build a strong portal for African resources. Although the contact address is situated in Princeton, USA, there are a lot of African partners. Especially if you are interested in botanical information, this is a great resource." The resource is worth developing, but the primary contact needs to shift to Africa (it also needs better cookie code, as it reports an error setting a cookie on my browser). Inge de Waard, Ignatia, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Portals, Africa] [Comment]

Assessing Impact: E-Portfolios in Higher Education
The summary reads "Using case studies to highlight best practices and research targeting the impact of e-portfolios in a long-standing program-wide implementation, this session will provide a frank assessment of the fundamental obstacles to e-portfolio adoption, balanced with an analysis of the benefits of implementation within higher education to date." The slide deck is 7.8 megabytes and will take a while to download. The presentation offers some anecdotal evidence but surveys far too few people to be statistically relevant. Interesting (though somewhat off-topic) presentation of some e-portfolio typologies. Glenn Johnson, Michael Reese and Linda Thornton, EDUCAUSE Connect, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Assessment, Research, E-Portfolios] [Comment]

Barriers to Personal Learning Environments
The barriers to personal learning environments (PLEs), according to Graham Attwell, include concerns that "many learners may not have the confidence and competence to develop and configure their own tools for learning" along with "fear by organisations of loss of institutional and managerial control." The former is yet another reiteration of the presumption that learners are cast into the wild with no fallback or support, which simply isn't part of the PLE model. The latter is more of a concern, since there simply isn't a clearly defined role for institutions in the use of PLEs. I've tried to mitigate that lack of clarity to some degree with the Connectivism course last fall, and will soon make it even more clear with some work on serialized feeds. Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Connectivism, Personal Learning Environment] [Comment]

Diki
Scott Leslie sends this interesting link along. "Diki is a peer-to-peer (or better: friend-to-friend) network for social semantic web application. Think of it as an instant messenger program for social networks like del.icio.us, bibsonomy, citeseer, facebook or studivz. Unlike those social networks, diki does not have a central server that stores your private data. The idea of diki is to create a social network that respects the users' privacy but giving them all functionality that server-based social networks have." The Java application has been released as open source software. Various Authors, Website, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Privacy Issues, Books, Networks, Semantic Web, Open Source, del.icio.us] [Comment]

Adult Learning Celebrated in Six Videos
The Canadian Council on Learning has released six videos celebrating adult learning. I especially enjoyed the one on the fishing industry because of the scenes from the Magdalene Islands. Other videos include on on the use of prior learning assessment for poverty reduction, literacy through theatre, family workshops, and more. Various Authors, Canadian Council on Learning, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video, Adult Learning, Canada] [Comment]

Nibipedia
This is interesting. The creators of this site have taken TED videos, associated time stamps with them, and associated Wikipedia pages with the time stamps. The list of pages is displayed as a set of icons below the video. You can use their 'nibs' or you can add nibs of your own. It does make videos - especially talking head videos - more interesting. I spent twenty minutes watching the Tierney Thys presentation on oceans. Via Maria Droujkova, on the WikiEducators mailing list. Various Authors, Website, January 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video, Wikipedia] [Comment]

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