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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
July 9, 2009

United Breaks Guitars
Because the band lives just down the road from here, and because I don't really like United either (yeah, I've got stories). But most of all, because revenge is a dish best served digitally. Here's the backstory. Sons of Maxwell, YouTube, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: RSS] [Comment]

Where's The Real Discussion On Our Discussion Lists
The Chronicle's Jeff Young may write that "the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook" but from my experience, people migrate pretty easily from one community to another, with mailing lists being one of many nodes. These lists have a lifespan, though, and while some of the old standbys (like, say, DEOS and WWWDEV) may be hollow shells, littered with conference ads and calls-for-papers (the ubiquitous spam of academic) and not much else, the discussions flourish on other lists. You can't just camp out and sit on a list for life (though some do) you have follow your muse from one list to the next, one site to the next. Probably a tough thing for old-style print journalists to imagine. StevenB, ACRLog, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Mailing Lists, Experience, Academia, Spam, Web Logs, Ubiquitous Internet, Networks] [Comment]

10 Principles for the Future of Learning
Everybody loves a list with ten items. Here are the principles:
- self-learning
- horizontal structures
- collective credibility
- de-dentered pedagogy
- open source education
- connectivity and interactivity
- lifelong learning
- mobilizing networks
- scalability and simulation
Many of these trends will be familiar to OLDaily readers. The blog, which is a group effort from about 14 people, may be new, though. It looks like it's a professional enterprise, though it's difficult to tell who is behind it. Here are their Facebook and their Twitter pages. Via Milton Ramirez. Jason Flom, The Edurati Review, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Online Learning, Simulations, Networks, Open Source, Interaction, Web Logs] [Comment]

One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality
Lessons learned from OLPC that should probably have been anticipated ahead of time. Like: "Diffusing a new innovation requires understanding the local environment." And "Innovative technology can be disruptive and trigger a backlash from incumbents" And "Innovative information technologies do not stand alone." Via OLPC News. Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrickand and Prakul Sharma, Communications of the ACM, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

ScratchEd – Community site for educators using Scratch
Alfred Thompson shares, "The people at the Lifelong Kindergarten Research group at MIT recently unveiled ScratchEd a new community site for educators who are using Scratch." Scratch was designed at MIT and, as described by Wikipedia, "has the goal of teaching programming concepts to children and teens and letting them create games, videos, and music." Unlike Squeak, on which it is based, Scratch is dynamic, allowing code to be changed while running, and hence, users to interact with it and see what happens. Alfred Thompson, Computer Science Teacher, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video, Wikipedia] [Comment]

e-Framework - time to stop polishing guys!
Is time and patience running out on eFramework, the collection of service descriptions for educational technologies? Andy Powell writes, "as far as I can tell the e-Framework consists only of a half-formed collection of unusable 'service' descriptions. So, how come this thing still has any life left in it?" Andy Powell, eFoundations, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Books Were Nice
Not that I think I'm Jack Kerouac. But I do know my books (were I to write any) would be pretty unappealing to publishers. Back in the age of books, that would be a problem. "They needed a publisher to print their books. Jeez. Glad that's over." Shelly Blake-Plock, Change.org, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Books] [Comment]

How to stop blogging
The editors of Nature present the perspective that scientists are afraid of bloggers, because they will disclose results previously only heard in the sanctity of the conference symposium. While some may suggest requiring bloggers to stay silent about what they hear, the editors are more realistic: the only way to prevent coverage is to close the session entirely. Meanwhile, the Chronicle, living in some sort of mystical non-existing world, interprets this as recommending that bloggers ignore rules imposed on journalists - as though a journalist would ever feel bound not to report on a session at a conference (or anything else for that matter). Editorial, Nature, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Web Logs] [Comment]

Follow us on Twitter
The funniest thing about this is this. Word count: 3,379. Via TechDirt. Various Authors, Wal-Mart, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter] [Comment]

[iDC] Education
Interesting post that looks at some of the dynamics of technology and education. In particular, Davin Heckman considers the implications of treating attention as a commodity and what happens when people - including students - ask what their time is worth. "These are all philosophical questions that revolve around 'the internet as factory," he writes. And we can ask, he writes, what sort of future we can imagine for ourselves when the most intimate aspects of ourselves are not for sale. "I would hope that the approach they take is one that
is critical, resistant, and ultimately radical... We need to figure out what we want to 'defend' and what we want to change." This post originally appeared (truncated) on the IDC list. Find more of Heckman's work here. Davin Heckman, IDC, July 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

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