Presentation
Dimensions of a Learning Network
Stephen Downes, October 25, 2010, XXVI Simposio Internacional de Computación en la Educación 2010, Monterrey, Mexico

Reprise of the talk I gave in Vancouver, with some additional examples and extended descriptions. The talk is an overview of the concept of learning networks, describing how the theories about self-organizing networks describe how we learn, and how we can organize learning.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspectives of European Youth
Henry Jenkins, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, October 25, 2010.

I haven't seen this video but I want to keep track of it, as it looks intresting. Henry Jenkins says, Sonia Livingstone "argued that many young people lack the skills and resources to learn online outside of the classroom environment, facing frustrations and distractions which make it difficult for them to achieve the full benefits we've seen in other instances of youth engagement with participatory culture."

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Foundations for a New Science of Learning
Andrew N. Meltzoff, Patricia K. Kuhl, Javier Movellan and Terrence J. Sejnowski, PubMed Central, October 25, 2010.

I think this is an interesting paper, and it certainly brings together a great deal of research relevant to learning theory, but they have approached the subject strictly from the perspective of current educational systems. We are told that in a formal setting, for example, "individual face-to-face tutoring is the most effective form of instruction." I have no doubt, but is instruction what we ought to be doing? Have we construed the standards of 'effectiveness' properly?

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PLENK 2010, Weeks 4-6: Learning Theories, Evaluation and Literacies
Stefanie Panke, educational technology & change, October 22, 2010.

Good update on how the PLENK course is going. "Despite the dwindling participation, the past three weeks were arguably the most interesting part of the course, exploring the theoretical background for personal learning environments, sharing experiences in evaluating the learning process in a PLE, and trying to define digital literacies for learning with PLEs." This is also the most interesting stuff for me. The declining participation is explained, in part, by the difficulties people have keeping up (also documented in this post) and the natural drop-off as people realize that they don't have time or inclination to keep working on it. The facilitators (including myself) are all accustomed to this phenomenon and no longer take it personally. Here's more from PLENK.

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Update on the semantic web, linked data and open
Robert Gregoire, Blogue du GTA, October 22, 2010.

There's an interesting pull between the concept of open data and what might be called the Semantic Web "no compromise" position on linked data. The principle is:
1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)
4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.
Robert Gregoire writes (in French), "No compromise in effect since these concepts are relatively new and are not yet unanimous... where it gets really interesting in the somewhat murky explanations of the previous system of Resource Management [is] RDFa, a tagging system to incorporate semantic information of RDF directly in HTML."

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Uncovered Gem: Marshall McLuhan's Global Village
maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 18, 2010.

Video of Marshall McLuhan from a 1960 recording. "These new media have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England and - boom boom boom! - we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa; a Hollywood star gets drunk - away go the drums again."

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