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by Stephen Downes
October 28, 2009

Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected'

We are all connected... The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. "'We Are All Connected' was made from sampling Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The History Channel's Universe series, Richard Feynman's 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye's Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking's Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music." melodysheep, YouTube, October 28, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

LaaN vs. Social Constructivism
According to Chatti, "learning as a Network (LaaN) differs from social constructivism in four different ways:
- In LaaN, knowledge is a personal network rather than an object that can be constructed.
- Unlike social constructivism, which views learning as internal developmental processes that result in mental development (i.e. intrinsic), LaaN views learning as both intrinsic and extrinsic
- Vygotsky's social constructivism has centered on the role adults play in fostering children's development... however, nowadays, the lines became blurred between the expert and novice roles.
- Unlike a ZPD which is characterized by a rigid, restrictive, and unidirectional development (i.e. training the novices within the ZPD towards a level of potential development), a knowledge ecology is open, multidirectional, and without an end point of development."
From where I sit, that's a pretty good summary.
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Technology Enhanced Learning, October 28, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Adult Learning, Constructivism] [Comment]

Guidelines for Developing Mobile Web Content
Gary Woodill writes, correctly, that "this document is a must read for anyone starting out to develop mobile web content... These guidelines are called Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and are based on extensive surveys of many mobile web designers and developers." Gary Woodill, Workplace Learning Today, October 28, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Power 101
This is actually a pretty good article. It describes a number of ways an administration faced with a budget crunch can work with - or deal with - angry union representatives. I have a history both of being a union representative and of serving on boards of governors, and the strategies ring true to me. They would work; they do work. None of them actually gives the unions what they want - so union leaders ought to take note - but some of them given them some influence over the process. So smart union leaders will seek to moderate this process, steering the administration toward those more consultative strategies. Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed, October 28, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

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