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by Stephen Downes
August 7, 2009

Podcasting for E-Learning: Putting it all together
capstone of a good short series on podcasting for education. I've listened to a lot pof podcasts over the years and can attest to Michael Hanley's observations about the sort of speech pattern that is "most apparent when a podcast has not been designed, planned and scripted properly." Filled with pauses, digressions and more pauses, the listener can hear the speaker searching for words. The key to good podcasting is planning. You can't fake it - not without a great deal of expertise and preparation. Listen the examples - they make the point better than I can. Michael Hanley, E-Learning Curve Blog, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Podcasting] [Comment]

10 Weeks to The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games
I don't do promos, but I will say here that, having watched Clark Aldrich write bits and pieces of this on his blog for months, maybe years (check the Clark Aldrich link for my coverage during this time), I will be looking forward to reading the whole thing. Aldrich writes, "This book is my magnum opus, the capstone of all of my thinking, and the intellectual product of which I am the most proud... with The Complete Guide, I have finally got to the heart of this topic. It hits everything, from the big ideas to the comprehensive cataloguing of the mechanics." Clark Aldrich, On Simulations and Serious Games, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Patents, Books, Open Source, Web Logs] [Comment]

Guidelines for Educators Using Social Networking Sites
Still very much a draft and pretty terse, this set of guidelines nonetheless offers educators something to think about when they consider using social networking sites.
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Networks] [Comment]

OpenEd 09 is getting all artsy and stuff...
Thank goodness Brian Lamb posted this. In it, he mentions my discussion with David Wiley, scheduled for August 11. For some reason, I had it in my head that I was departing August 11. Here's the outline page and link to sign up if you're interested in watching (it's a smallish room, because the main point is to have the discussion, and not to put on some kind of show) Anyhow, I am really looking forward to the OpenEd conference in Vancouver - and, instead of missing my flight by two days, I'll actually be there. Brian Lamb, Abject Learning, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

It's SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites
Bookmarks and commentary on this Guardian article picking up on the theme that youth are abandoning social network sites. "The percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds who have a profile on a social networking site has dropped for the first time – from 55% at the start of last year to 50% this year." Beth Kanter runs a frenetic focus group to find out what's going on (4 minute video). More on this: a report from a 15-year old at Morgan Stanley, Nielson figures confirming the trend, and danah boyd's analysis. Melanie McBride, Diigo, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Usability, Twitter, Networks, Video, Cool] [Comment]

Twitter DoS and single points of failure
I really think this is the correct lesson to be learned from Twitter's troubles (not that we haven't said it here before): "away from the hilarity, Dave Winer's developing rssCloud and people are beginning to talk about Laconi.ca. The only model that makes sense is a distributed one: it's a fundamentally harder problem to bring down a decentralized network, because there isn't a single point of failure." Related: Valdis Krebs analyzes Twitter-style networks. "Twitter, Facebook, GMail and all other single site based services play with the Betweenness Paradox -- ultimate power/control when in operation, ultimate fail when not. Single point of failure. Brittleness, not resiliency." Ben Werdmuller, Weblog, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Networks, RSS] [Comment]

File Information Tool Set (FITS)
This is interesting: "our file format identification, validation and metadata extraction tools should work with a broad range of formats and genres... can both support a wide range of formats and extract the technical metadata necessary to fully characterize digital content." Various Authors, Google, August 7, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Information, Metadata] [Comment]

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