Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
May 6, 2010

Connectivist Learning and Teaching
Presentation addressing what teachers need to do in order to learn from the internet. There is a second part, describing connectivist teaching, which was not presented, but is in the slides. Presentation by Stephen Downes, , ,

Experiments With RDFa
Some people have asked about the harvesting I talked about yesterday - this sort of thing makes it work. It's RDFa, and it allows content to be encoded in web pages in a systematic way. Content, for example, like event listings - or, if we want, pairings of content with curricular requirements. There will never be One Aggregator To Rule Them All, but we can get close to what we want with simple specifications that anyone can create. See also Linked data and lessons from the past. Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, May 6, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Resource Description Framework] [Comment] [Tweet]

Schooled: Relevancy is Key (Video)
OK, just for the record, there is no such word as "relevancy" - the word is "relevance". That is all. Oliver Shelton, the xplanation, May 6, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Video] [Comment] [Tweet]

Scribd CTO: We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5
Scribd - which specializes in making documents difficult to read - is betting the company on HTML5. Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman says: "We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page." Well, yeah. That, and Apple won't support Flash. Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch, May 6, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Apple Inc., Experience, Scribd] [Comment] [Tweet]

The Ping Pong Effect
What Valdis Krebs is describing here is a cascade effect - when a network cycles out of control. Some cascades can be beneficial, but generally they create excess that wrecks the network. This is what happened with the mortgage and debt crisis, as every player was happy to work the system while the system spun out of control. Krebs says there was no cause, but speculates, "Maybe the system itself is to blame? It was set up to generate positive feedback loops with no monitor of levels or cutoff when things get out of hand." Well, yes, it was set up this way deliberate;y - and that was the cause. We need cutoffs -- more commonly known as regulations and taxes - in order to constrain cascade effects. People who argue that we don's are arguing through their hands - they want to profit themselves, and don't care whether the network is wrecked. Valdis Krebs, T N T - The Network Thinker, May 6, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Networks] [Comment] [Tweet]

New Poll: People Are Delusional About Retirement
I know that this isn't directly about education, but teachers ought to take note. This is especially the case now that governments are clawing back pension plans. I have always been sceptical of pension plans based on investments. After all, there's an old Ferengi saying, "Never give the money back". Once people have been induced to pay money for what is essentially nothing, they will have more and more difficulties getting it back. People should be more concerned about the state of the public pension system. "Only the top 10 percent of households have pension wealth that is significantly larger than the wealth they have from Social Security." Which means all teachers will depend on the government for their pensions. Teresa Ghilarducci, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2010 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment] [Tweet]

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