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by Stephen Downes
December 2, 2009

The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning
The role of open educational resources is to function as a vocabulary in which we converse. The main emphasis of this presentation was to speak of their role in the development of networks - these networks are the characteristic result of conversations. Presentation by Stephen Downes, International Seminar on Open Social Learning (OSL), Barcelona, Spain, [Link]

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

I'm in Barcelona for two conferences; I gave a talk at one yesterday and I dive the second tomorrow. The hotel internet has had some hiccups and may again so don't be too surprised by an interruption in service. Anyhow, I think you'll enjoy this set of images, all from Gaudi's masterpiece, the as yet unfinished Sagrada Familia. As always, the slide show is the nicest view. Stephen Downes, Flickr, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Flickr] [Comment]

Bad Backchannel: My Take on Danah Boyd's Bad Day
Oh, I need to make this point, because pople will believe, like Vicki Davis, that "All presentation backchannels should have moderators." The thing is, you can't moderate backchannels. You can control what's displayed on the big screen, if you want (and if your audience is squeamish, you may want to). But you can't control what's said on, say, Twitter. Just. Can't. That said, I agree with her that "a chat room is so much better for this anyway because it can be archived and allows more meaningful conversation and more extensive replies," which is why when I was doing it I used my own chat room. People still chattered on Twitter, though (next time I'll aggregate the tweets into my chat room). Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter] [Comment]

Media Literacy for Google Fundamentalists
The Great Google Outage continues in my home in Moncton, as the Rogers Internet DNS service cannot seem to find the internet search site (or any of its affiliates, such as Blogger). I'm going to put the entire household on OpenDNS when I get home, but in the meantime, I have to wonder what sort of nefarious silliness Rogers is up to (oh yes, I know they're up to something, they've been hijacking (increasingly frequent) DNS errors and routing 404 results to Yahoo searches). Meanwhile, for those who do get Google and trust it religiously, some media literacy, including stuff on peer reviewed journals and popular media. Clay Burell, Beyond School, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Blogger, Google, Yahoo!] [Comment]

How do knowledge workers work?
So how does distributed cognition apply to corporate learning. Gina Minks works out the implications. "Maybe some of it goes back to information-seeking behavior. Techies have their own language, history, culture. We have our own distributed memory, our own languages that invoke that memory. If a n00b doesn't have the language to ask some 133t techie a question, they may dismissed as unimportant... If I'm asked, why doesn't it work? I say, 'because it hates you'. Not because I'm being mean, but this is how I learned to start figuring things out on my own." Gina Minks, Adventures in Corporate Education, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning] [Comment]

JISC launches 2010-2012 strategy
JISC, which has played such an important role in the development of online learning over the last few years, has released its strategy for 2010-2012. "Focus will be given to online learning, management information systems, cloud computing, innovation and impact." There's a video with reactions. Press Releasse, JISC, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Video, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)] [Comment]

Edutopia Welcome Lounge
Edutopia has launched an online community for teachers, featuring groups, blogs, and message areas. 236 members as of this writing, so it looks like it's off the ground. The RSS feeds aren't working properly(this feed for example doesn't render in Google Reader), and what would really be nice would be a single feed for all the blogs. Various Authors, Edutopia, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Google, RSS, Online Learning Communities, Web Logs] [Comment]

UOC UNESCO Chair Conference Summaries
These are summaries of the talks at the UOC UNESCO Chair conference in Barcelona, including my (Stephen's) session, here, and two of George's, here and here. Various Authors, Weblog, December 2, 2009 [Link] [Tags: UNESCO, Open Content] [Comment]

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