Launch of National Repository of Open Education Resources (NROER)
Shashi Tharoor, Government of India, August 13, 2013

Via Cable Green I read that "The new India "National Repository of Open Education Resources" has been launched, and Dr. Tharoor, the Human Resource Development Minister, just announced all resources (unless mentioned otherwise) are licensed CC-BY-SA." This link is to the speech by Shashi Tharoor making the announcement. "ICT is a tool that will help enhance the way education is imparted in schools," he says. "It will open doors for new ways of interactive learning for the students and indeed for the teachers. However, this comes with an underlying caveat that in order to use this tool, students need to have free and open access to educational resources."

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You must remember this
Roberta Walker, CBC | Think About It, August 13, 2013

On the way today from the campsite to the Tim Hortons (my PEI office) I listened to an excellent discussion of memory on the CBC Radio program Think About It. It's worth a listen. It nicely responds to the (very incorrect) 'stored picture' and 'brain as disk drive' concepts of memory, describing and explaining how memories are created as activations of neural systems, the impact of context (via emptional and other physical states) on memory, and the role of sleep. Host Roberta Walker talks with neuroscientist Sheena Josselyn who studies memory systems at the Hospital for Sick Children, John Peever, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto, former MIT visiting scholar, hacker and bioentrepreneur Connor Dickie, and  Carl Schoonover, neuroscientist and authour of Portraits of the Mind

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We Know More Than We Can Say: The Paradox of Tacit Knowledge - Part One
Nancy Dixon, Conversation Matters, August 11, 2013

Many people talk about tacit knowledge, but as Nancy Dixon writes, "those quoting the phrase seldom go beyond referencing it to Polanyi, providing little explanation or reasoning for why, if we know it, we can’t just write it down." True, but I'm not really happy with her answer: "What we learn from experience is stored, not in the form of answers, but in bits and pieces of the experience we have accumulated, sometimes over years." We used these "bits and piueces", she says, to "construct" sentences representing out knowledge. Tacit knowledge, says Dixon, is what Dorothy Leonard calls Deep Smarts, or is like the knowledge shared by copier repair te chnicians, as described by Julian Orr, Yes, it's a form of pattern recognition, as documented in Sources of Power by Gary Klein. But pattern recognition is very different from construction.

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Learning To Program Does Not Mean You’ll Be A Programmer
Dan Bridge, Collision Games, August 11, 2013

I agree with the sentiment, expressed in this post, that people should learn to program, as it develops key communications and reasoning skills. But this article, like so many like it, does not say exactly what 'to program' means. Hire someone these days and they'll be skilled at installing frameworks and configuring databases, but poor at writing code from scratch. Or, like me, they may be able to hack some Perl, but be oblivious to software engineering. There's no single discipline any more. As the case for most things.

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The State of Educational Blogging 2013
Sue Waters, The Edublogger, August 9, 2013

There's quite a bit of information in this post about educational blogging (that's what they used to do before MOOCs) based on a survey conducted by Sue Waters at The Edublogger. Readers will especially appreciate the lengthy list of class blogs that serve as inspiration and examples for your own classes. Why do teachers support class blogs? "It gives an insight into the complexity of the students – their likes, dislikes, what they do outside school etc. I have got to know and understand students better by reading their posts."

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