Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
September 3, 2010

The future of digital learning
More of this: "Sherman Dorn is skeptical. Technology is not a silver bullet, he warns." Sign. Nothing is a silver bullet. Nothing! Not even silver bullets. So it's no objection whatsoever to say such and such does not solve all the problems. And it's a waste of valuable bandwidth running them. Just saying. Joanne Jacobs, Weblog, September 1, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

Social Media Burn-out? You're doing it wrong!
Social media is supposed to make your life easier, not burn you out. So if you're burning out, you are using social media improperly. That's the premise of this post, and it's an argument that makes sense to me. "The reality is that you engage, and you disengage, and then you do it again, and again, and again. Each person's need to engage is different from everyone else. This is critical to understand when you are implementing social learning within your organization. Please save yourself the misery of failure and DO NOT hyper formalize HOW people engage with whatever system you choose to implement. And DO NOT make participation mandatory or connected to pay or anything like that. Social anything needs to be authentic, period." Brent Schlenker, Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development, September 1, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

And you thought email was dead…
I depend on email, and my main issue is not with the formal but that it's hard to integrate into the rest of my work (I want a nice email-to-database integration). George Siemens mentions Greplin, which is "a service for searching across multiple platforms: gmail, twitter, facebook, dropbox, etc." And email is being touted as a service with "platform capability". Well - that's too much. The only reason there's a "platform capability" is that email has really failed to merge with any other application. I want to see a "merge capability". So my email becomes part of my data, generically. It'll happen; give it time. George Siemens, elearnspace, September 1, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

Meaningful Disclosure Hard To Come By
Interesting commentary: "'This newspaper would not be here if not for LSAT prep courses and proprietary schools, but trust our reporting anyway'" - Columbia Journalism Review Q and A about WaPo conflict of interest disclosure." Alexander Russo, This Week In Education, September 1, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

Simple voting boxes to enhance learning
I read from time to time about in-class voting response systems, and while I think it's a great pub game, I don't see the merit in education. Which is why I'm a bit surprised to see Ignatia promoting them. But then, it occurred to me, perhaps I'm missing the emphasis on voting. And perhaps these devices will be used, much like their real world counterparts, can be used not just to count results, but to produce results. Ah, and the educational implications of data manipulation are indeed evident. Or maybe there's some way for students to know that in-class voting is not being rigged? Inge de Waard, Ignatia, August 26, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

21st Century Education From New Learning Institute
I guess now that we're well into the 21st century (who would have thought?) it's time for people to wrestle over the definition of "21st century learning". We know that it won't be the same as 19th century learning. These videos leave us wondering how different it will be from 20th century learning. Amit Garg, The Upside Learning Solutions Blog, August 26, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

School terror lesson to kill Australians: Is there educative potential here or just poor professional judgement?
When I was a kid we played war and somebody always had to play the Germans (it's hard to believe I was born only 14 years after the end of the Second World War, hm?). That's the essence of play - imaging, considering, mapping out scenarios. That's also how you learn. Yes, I know it's fashionable (and reactionary) to say you should never do things like learn how to plot a terrorist attack. But if you have no conception of how such an attack is planned, how do you possibly spot it, and respond to it? Ignorance is not education. Jon Austin, The Freire Project, August 26, 2010 [Link] [Comment] [Tweet]

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.