May 4, 2012
Speaking in Lolcats: What Literacy Means in teh Digital Era
Stephen Downes,
Stephen's Web, May 4, 2012.
Full transcript of a talk I gave a few years ago, one I've always considered pretty key to my philosophy. Just completed, hot off the press.
What I'm Obsessed About
Boris Mann,
Weblog, May 4, 2012.
Boris Mann gives us a really good list of technological developments to be watching - none of them are Future Tech - they exist now and we can access them. But the concepts they embody have not yet been internalized by developers and especially users. Here are the concepts: database replacing documents, collaborative (or, as I would say, cooperative) flow (Flowdock, Hojoki, Grove.io, Ginger, and HipChat), integrated email (I am dyingto find a way to merge email with gRSShopper), curation agents (or better, context and interpretation agents), rich media eBooks, and business (and social) data platforms.
Selecting meaningful #socialmedia tools for a #MOOC or #PLN
Inge de Waard,
Ignatia Webs, May 4, 2012.
Ignatia looks at an array of social media tools and matches them to their best use and implementation. "A big part of setting up an open, online course (e.g. MOOC), or gearing up for a Personal Learning Network (PLN) is the selection of meaning social media tools, "she writes. "In order to get an overview of the big families in social media, I started to make a list for my own comprehension and future selection." See also Where MOOC becomes joint venture. She writes, "there is only one thing left to do before learning/teaching diversity comes down to the one, global, dominant model: getting the diversity of models gathered in a book." I started one here - The MOOC Guide - but haven't really had the chance to flesh it out (if you want to add to it, send me an email).
The Sixty Million Dollar MOOC
Alan Levine,
CogDogBlog, May 4, 2012.
"Higher education, learning. A concept barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s most massive online course. Edx will be that course. better than it was before. Massive. Open. Online."
Constructing academic knowledge
Alex Reid,
Digital Digs, May 4, 2012.
There's so much wrong with the expression 'knowledge construction' in my mind that it's diffcult to know where to start with the criticism. Alex Reid helps, though. He comments, "Levi Bryant has a great post on the problem with the term "construction." I think his point echoes those that Latour has been making for some time. We start with the presumed nature/culture divide of the modern world, but one that is continually unmade in issues ranging from gender, race and sexuality to environment and economics."
That's a good criticism, but he follows up later with, "What constructing ought to denote, but perhaps never will (hence Levi and Latour's calls for a new term), is that the knowledge we produce is another object in the world, made from other objects in the world (including us)." Which isn't really right; as I was commenting in an interview today, knowledge isn't an object, it's a property of an object (and specifically, a cognitively sophtsticated object, like a human). We shouldn't say "Jane has knowledge." We should say "Jane knows."
Day Against DRM 2012
Jane Park,
Creative Commons, May 4, 2012.
In celebration of the 'Day Against DRM', today's OLdaily is DRM-free, and everything it links to is DRM free. Of course, here, every day is a Day Against DRM.
Social Apps, By Default, Are Hijacking Facebook
Steve Borsch,
Connecting the Dots, May 4, 2012.
Netflix has been really really really insisting recently that I sign up with Facebook, insisting to the point of making me login again every time I start it up on my iPad. What it wants to do of course is to send a Facebook post every time I watch something new. I'm quite sure nobody wants to see a reference to every single one of the 132 episodes of Xena: Warrior Princes I watched over the last six months or so (I just finished the series Wednesday) especially given that it took two or three tries to get through some of the season 6 episodes. Nor do they want to see me flip back and forth between Breaking Bad, Captain America, Battlestar Galactica and Mad About You as I 'flip channels' bouncing from one show to another to find one in sync with my tastes. But that's the world of Facebook Apps these days, and of course, with One True Identity I can't create separate streams for different stuff. Steve Borsch talks about editing apps - me, I don't use apps in Facebook at all.
Maps and Videos of Mouse Brains
Richard Byrne,
Free Technology for Teachers, May 3, 2012.
Richard Byrne: "Rsearchers at Texas A&M University have scanned mouse brains and mapped them using the Google Maps API. The mapped scans can be explored using the same zoom functions that you find in Google Maps. After exploring the maps you should also check out the videos of the brain scans." I'm including this so that if I ever do a search for brain videos, I'll find this. Because you never know when you'll need a video of a mouse brain.
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