Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
October 8, 2009

Personal Learning Environments & Personal Learning Networks
A symposium will be held from October 13th till October 16th 2009 on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).

That's Next Week!

Speakers will include developers and researchers of PLEs. All events will be hosted in Elluminate and recorded for archives. A discussion forum will be hosted in Moodle for asynchronous interactions.

Learn more!

Sponsored by the University of Manitoba Learning Technologies Centre and The National Research Council of Canada PLE Project.

NRC-IIT & the New Brunswick Cluster
Our Institute (NRC's Institute for Information Technology) has released a promotional video highlighting the importance of the Institute's work, especially here in Atlantic Canada. It's a good video, so far as it goes, but no, I'm not in it anywhere. I know that the work we do here in the Learning and Collaborative Technologies group is important, and contributes mightily to the statistics and accomplishments mentioned in the video.

There's also a French version. Various Authors, NRC-IIT, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Information, Video, Canada] [Comment]

me.edu.au is now an OpenID provider
Things have been quiet on the Australian front recently (don't know whether it's me or whether things really are quiet) but if you're an educator in Australia and you want a relevant OpenID, you can now get one from me.edu.au. Kerrie Smith, You Are Never Alone, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: OpenID, Australia] [Comment]

Exploring Personal Learning Environments
There are papers from "a symposium on Personal Learning Environments at the the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009)." I'm seeing again a reflection of PLEs as collections of widgets. "Widget based mashups seem to be a proper approach to realise self-organisable Personal Learning Environments." I think widgets can be useful - but I think a PLE is more than widgets. Anyhow, there is a lot here to mull over in these five papers and sets of presentation slides. Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Personal Learning Environment] [Comment]

NBC + Blackboard makes me want to hurl
"Oh, please make it stop," writes Mike Caulfield. "Blackboard is primarily an access control company. But not content to be in the lucrative business of dining hall management, video surveillance, and door access control, Blackboard's real endgame is to aid those who want to lock up culture. The last gasp of the LMS will be to convince schools that a contract with Blackboard (or Epsilen, a NYT LMS offering) allows their students to use work they are legally entitled to use anyway. I can't really think of anything more disturbing, or more telling." Couldn't agree more. Mike Caulfield, Weblog, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Online Learning, Video, Blackboard Inc.] [Comment]

Google Wave: I want it because I hate e-mail
Well - yeah, but... for me, the big missing link has been a way to take my email coming in and use it somewhere other than in my email reader. It's like I have this one system for blogs, Flickr, twitter, RSS and the rest (including Wave), and another for email. If I could convert incoming emails to Waves, then the system would be very interesting to me. Amy Gahran, Contentious, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Google, RSS, Flickr, Web Logs] [Comment]

Canadian winner bemoans bureaucracy
The Canadian whose work led to the development of digital photography won a Nobel prize in physics this week, but he had to do all his work in the United States. Why? According to this article, red tape and bureaucracy. "What scientists face today is "almost disgraceful … The bureaucrats want to get a hold of the money and ask for business plans. Now do you think that George Smith and I ever wrote a business plan? Not at all," Dr. Boyle, now 85 and retired, told a reporter Tuesday. "You don't have time to do that kind of baloney."" Well, I'd add more, but I have some quarterly reports due. Jill Mahoney and Elizabeth Church, Globe and Mail, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: United States, Canada, Image Software] [Comment]

Bonfire of the Banned ITs: Why you can't get the Kindle in Canada
You know I don't really care whether or not the Kindle is available in Canada. But the delays are just more indications that, despite what we are told by the carriers, broadcasters and wireless companies operate like fiefdoms in Canada, preventing access not only to the Kindle but to all manner or content and services. "For Canadian consumers, it's yet another in a long line of annoying delays and prohibitions – from smartphones that take years to go on sale to online gift cards that are bound by mysterious legal restrictions to Internet video that won't play once it recognizes the user isn't in a particular country." Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail, October 8, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Wireless, Canada] [Comment]

This newsletter is sent only at the request of subscribers. If you would like to unsubscribe, Click here.

Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list. Click here to subscribe.