Stephen's Web

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by Stephen Downes
March 17, 2009

SXSW Austin

I'm home from Austin and have posted my photos. As usual, the best way to view them is as a slide show. Stephen Downes, Flickr, March 17, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Flickr] [Comment]

Stephen Downes On Personal Learning Networks
I recently created a stand-alone page for my video Web 2.0 and your own Learning and Development because Google Video is shutting down and I wanted a permanent home for people to link to (so much for saying that really big companies like Google can be trusted with your content). I also linked to it via Twitter at SXSW (When in Rome, tweet like the Romanians) and it has been found by a few people, including Marian Thacher, who discusses it here. One note: she says, "all of this only works for the very motivated learner... what about that learner who isn't so motivated, who has some learning challenges, for whom school was more of a misery than a joy?" Quite so - which is why I stress enabling students to manage their own learning and to follow their own interests. Otherwise, they won't be motivated, and the rest of this stuff is not nearly as effective as it could be. Marian Thacher, Adult Education and Technology, March 17, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Twitter, Online Learning, Web 2.0, Video, Google, YouTube] [Comment]

A Knowledge-Based Approach to Retrieving Teaching Materials for Context-Aware Learning
This is a very nice and detailed paper describing a context-aware content retrieval system "consisting of four components: knowledge transformation,
query expansion, content retrieval and user interface." The system not only depends on contextual awareness, it also draws on a relevant knowledge base used to expand queries based on ontologies and other course-specific information. See especially figure 6, about halfway through the paper, for an overview diagram of the system. PDF. Wen-Chung Shih and Shian-Shyong Tseng, Educational Technology & Society, March 17, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Ontologies, Semantic Web] [Comment]

National Program for E-Learning in Taiwan
A genuinely impressive array of statistics and supporting data supports the authors' claim that e-learning has had a significant academic, social and industrial impact in Taiwan. "It reveals how such kind of national program succeeds in helping corporations enhance competitiveness, improving public welfare in Taiwan, and stimulating the research outputs in both industry and academia." PDF. Maiga Chang, Chin-Yeh Wang, and Gwo-Dong Chen, Journal of Educational Technology & Society, March 17, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Research, Academia] [Comment]

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