May 8, 2012
Google Plus Hangouts on Air feature now available to all users
David Andrade ,
Educational Technology Guy, May 8, 2012.
By far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconferencew with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. "With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post." Too awesome. For my money, this becomes an immediate replacement for Elluminate (aka Blackboard Collaborate) in many open online classes (because, it's not like we can afford Blackboard's prices anyhow). Sadly, it's not available for everybody just yet - it's not enabled in my own account, for example - but is being rolled out gradually.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: YouTube, Video, Conferencing, Blackboard Inc., Audio Chat and Conferencing, Google]
Cowbirding
Alan Levine,
CogDogBlog, May 8, 2012.
As quoted by Alan Levine, "Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching 'sagas' that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story. Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance." I was thinking yesterday that we need something like a 'News Commons'. This isn't it, but it looks in the right direction.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Experience, Wikipedia, Open Access, Audio]
Walters Museum uploads 19,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons
Matthew Roth,
WikiMedia Foundation, May 8, 2012.
At a certain point, these cultural treasures become a part of our common heritage. "The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings." Beautiful.
The Myth of Independent Learning
Kio Stark,
Skillshare Presents The Penny Conference, May 8, 2012.
Why did people drop out of school, asks Kio Stark? "The problem is, we've made school the primary infrastructure for learning." Learning wasn't autonomous, learning wasn't active, and there was no room to fail. So she wants to be in favour of indepoendent learning. People tend to leap to the conclusion that this means learning by oneself as an autodidact. But this is a myth - learning is really social, something we do with each other. Hackerspace, Genspace, Stack Overload and LessWrong are all examples of community learning spaces outside schools. Memrise, NoteEd, TeamRise, Einstein, Mendelay - these are examples of spaces where learning communities can form. But what we see today "is a pale imitation of real openness." Classic TED-style presentation (which "here's the thing" repeated four times). There are more videos on this site containing videos from Skillshare's Penny Conference
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Learning Communities, Schools, Video, Online Learning Communities, Online Learning, Attrition]
Alberta Court of Appeal Rules Portions of Privacy Law Unconstitutional
Alberta Court of Appeal,
CanLII, May 8, 2012.
Sometimes you don't want to be anywhere near legal writing, and sometimes it leaps off the page. The decision in this Alberta Court of Appeal case falls into the latter category; it is a detailed and incisive examination of why Alberta's privacy legislation is unconstitutional. Strickly read, it would have prohibited a union from taking video of people crossing a picket line. This sort of public recording of public action is becoming increasingly commonplace (I had a conversation recently with the RCMP about photographing a person who had parked in front of my driveway). Prohibiting this sort of expression, the court ruled, violates our constitutional rights (and you can't fix the act by reinterpreting 'journalism' or 'public' or any of the other exceptions allowed in the existing act). Thanks to Michael Geist for the reference.
An Analysis Of Ivan Illich's "Learning Webs" In Reference To "Deschooling Society"
Doninick Hallie,
Website, May 8, 2012.
This website looks at three recent open online learning initiatives - Academic Earth, Khan Academy, and Course Networking- and evaluates them with respect to the Ivan Illich webs scording system. Of course, "This scoring system would not have gained the approval of Illich due to its radiation of institutionalization." Thanks to Scott Leslie for the link.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Schools, Project Based Learning, Networks, Online Learning, Academia]
The Massive Open Online Professor
Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt,
Academic Matters, May 8, 2012.
"The challenges faced by higher education around the world are daunting and cannot be met by the traditional institution-based education system," write Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt. What we are seeing through recent work is that there is another way. Of course they focus on the Coursera and MITx model. "Open content lies at the core of these massive online courses. Typically, a series of video lectures, with short quizzes built in, make up the bulk of the instruction for users."
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Video]
Social Business – Where Bosses and Managers Become Servant Leaders
Luis Suarez,
E L S U A, May 8, 2012.
Your local McDonald's ios probably being run by a manager 1.0 and will continue to do so until worker rights become much more entrenched. But professional workplaces, staffed by people with more marketable skills, are being managed by a new style of manager - or are losing both their staff and their relevance. Luis Suarez describes the new style of management in this post. He writes, "Long gone are the days of micro-management, of managing by fear, power, bullying or mediocrity, or, just simply, by believing that the mantra “I am the boss; do what I say … or else!” would still work in today’s current business environment."
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