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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
September 9, 2009

Last Day in Austria

Flying home first thing tomorrow, so there probably won't be a newsletter. Don't forget, the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course starts Monday - you can sign up here (I've had some traffic outages on the site today, so it it's too busy, try again in a few minutes).
Stephen Downes, Flickr, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Connectivism, Newsletters, Flickr] [Comment]

What do we mean by engagement online?
I'm not sure we need to define "full engagement" but it is helpful to have a discussion of what we mean by the concept. "It ranges from active participation in a group activity, to the subtle and often invisible internal engagement of listening, thinking, or taking and using what one hears from a group and applying it within or outside of that group. One one end you have very visible ways to observe and measure engagement. At the other end you rarely even know it exists." Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Howard Rheingold on Essential Media Literacies
From the post: "Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don't know how," says Howard Rheingold in this video captured by JD Lasica over at socialmedia.biz. "The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift" and discern. Unattributed, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video] [Comment]

9 presentations on 9/9/09
Nine presentations from various sources. "How appropriate weird that there are nine of them and today is 9/9/09." Janet Clarey, Brandon Hall, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Question of the Day: Are netbooks doomed by the lack of manbags?
I have one word for Nick Jones: Jypsiere. By Hermes. Gary Woodill, Workplace Learning Today, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

New E-Textbooks Do More Than Inform: They'll Even Grade You
The Chronicle picks up a McGraw-Hill press release from Tuesday and reports on some new services offered by the publisher, including an online quiz and quiz-marking service. The textbooks, of course, don't grade you - an online application does that. The strategy is clear: "The company is urging professors to require the electronic textbooks for their courses, rather than leave it up to students whether they buy a printed book or an e-textbook." But one wonders how the service would fare against an unbundled competitor: a stand-alone quiz generation and marking service that feeds into institutional LMSs or (perhaps better) SISs. The Chronicle, meanwhile, is quick to leap to the doomsday scenario: "Is it possible that publishers could start selling textbooks that replace the need for going to class altogether?" Or maybe grading could be crowdsourced. Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Assessment, Books] [Comment]

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
What's interesting about this item isn't so much the book, which has been out for a number of years now, but the experience of reading it on Google Books. So far, the Google search for this book returns the the book website as the first result - one wonders how long this will last. According to Boyle, "The public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the realm of material protected by intellectual property rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it." James Boyle, Google Books, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Patents, Books, Google, Experience, Copyrights, Patents] [Comment]

LazyFeed: 1st Independent RSS Aggregator Declares Support for RSSCloud
Just what the world needed: a faster RSS. "LazyFeed is a service that tracks blog posts by topic and notifies users in real time when new posts of interest from across the web are available. You don't subscribe to RSS feeds in LazyFeed; users select topics manually or the service can suggest topics based on the interests you've already exhibited." Obviously I just have to make my own software compliant with this new feature. Next week. Related: "Fever looks for hot "discussions" across your many feeds. It actually encourages you to add more feeds, even ones you're less interested in following on a regular basis, but consider trusted sources." Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb, September 9, 2009 [Link] [Tags: RSS, Web Logs] [Comment]

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