Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
February 4, 2010

Trends In Personal Learning
Audio and slides from my presentation last night, Trends in Personal Learning. Review of major trends in technology - personal access, content creation, presentation and conferencing, networking and community, immersion and simulation, augmented reality - and discussion of how these define and inform personal learning. // Archive Info Name: FlexEd Virtual Session - 02/04/2010 11:56 URL: http://161.50.50.74/launcher.cgi?room=FlexEdRoom_2010_0204_1156_37 Presentation by Stephen Downes, , Canberra, Australia, online via Wimba, [Link]

H.264 Format Free To End Users Until (At Least) 2016
Maybe some of the bad press had an impact on the MPEG Licensing Authority, which announced royalty-free H.264 until the end of 2015. They may, as Christopher Blizzard suggests, have learned the lesson from .GIF - "As a direct result of this threat to open use of the Web the W3C coordinated development of the PNG (Portable network Graphic) file format, which provide a royalty-free alternative to GIF which was also had richer functionality." Will that clear up the HTML5 video logjam? Well, no. But it might help, a bit. Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, February 4, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Video, Web Logs] [Comment] [Tweet]

Learning Technologies 2010 – Day 2 Recap
Some good summary from Learning Technologies 2010, including some useful graphics. Day One, Day Two. From Josh Bersin we learn:
- The change gap is increasing
- 72% of large companies felt that their more effective training was informal
- Compared to USA the UK spends 29% more per learner but uses half as much eLearning.
- Deep Specialization is emerging as a key strategy. He used Intel's example to drive this point home.
We also get some video from Stephen Heppell. Amit Garg , The Upside Learning Solutions Blog, February 4, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Great Britain, Online Learning, Video] [Comment] [Tweet]

The True Cost of Informal Learning
Some charts, based on actual research, documenting how much is spent on informal learning. The 80 percent of learning accomplished by informal learning is accompanied, according to this research, by almost 80 percent of the spending, leading Donald Clark to say "we discover that rather than being this highly efficient learning machine, it is probably just about as efficient as formal learning" and "rather than being this highly efficient learning machine that we can ignore, it may require just as much of our attention as the formal side of learning." But one wonders what the constitutes the reported spend on informal learning. I get the impression they are including everything up to and including the water cooler around which people gather. And I wonder how well the spend on informal learning would fare if analyzed for value. Was it really an investment in learning, or was it just filed under that for lack of a better category? Donald Clark , Big Dog, Little Dog, February 4, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Ontologies, Research, Cool] [Comment] [Tweet]

Creative Commons in your Organization or Publication?
Discussion of open access license policies and a survey of major collections. The tone of the piece, oddly, is that copyleft is bad, probably because the licensing is viewed from a perspective of combining resources. "There are unfortunately no resource collections that combine peer review or other standard quality assurance processes to resources that are, at the same time, exempt from copyleft limitations." My own view is that, in a web-enabled world, there is much less of a need to combine resources. Norm Friesen, Weblog, February 4, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Quality, Open Access] [Comment] [Tweet]

14 Tips to Get More from Your Amazon Kindle
This guide reminds me that my current blog reading habits would cost about $800 a day on the Kindle. Because there's no 'free' option, blogs such as TechCrunch and Cool Cat cost 99 cents a day. Not good. But that's what you can do when you own a closed marketplace. That said, the Guide itself is a great introduction to the Kindle. Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, February 4, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Web Logs] [Comment] [Tweet]

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