By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: CCL Conference on Adult Learning, June 22, 2006
I am at the Canadian Council on Learning conference on adult education in Fredericton. Though I had expected this would be much more management and administration focused than it was, I found it to be a refreshing blend of adult educators and academic working for change. This to me was a very welcome delevopment, as it represents a broad resistance against the idea of learning as commodity, something that can be sliced and diced and measured and sold by the seat-hour to the developing world (whee, I'm all activisty now).
I blogged the keynote address by Maude Barlow and four sessions today; there's a bit more to come tomorrow. The format of the four sessions (each devoted to a different aspect of adult education) was to have an academic present the research report, and then to have a practitioner comment on it. This worked, in my view, really well, keeping the academics honest and the practitioners involved. Anyhow, here's the blogging:

- Maude Barlow
- E-Learning
- Learning Communities
- Social Movement Learning
- Culture

I hope you enjoy these reports as much as I enjoyed writing them. This really was a fine day, really good for my spirits. In our world of electronic learning we are sometimes isolated between the corporatists and the technologists. But it's nice to see a firm representation of (shall we say) the humanists out there. [Tags: Online Learning, Canada, Web Logs, Research, Academics and Academia] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeff Jarvis[Edit][Delete]: Toy Company Breaks Little Girls' Hearts, BuzzMachine [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Why am I so dogmatic about open and distributed online communities? Stories like this offer the answer. Jeff Jarvis writes, "Mattel is shutting down its American Girl Club and our daughter is rightfully upset." As he points out, "Because of the anonymity features of the community, this means that thousands of friendships are suddenly cut off." Rex Hammock is more blunt. "The issue here is one of 'identity.' Who owns 'me' online? I think I own my identity, but the weasles at Mattel obviously think they own the identities (even if they are 'anonymous' avatars of real girls) of the American Girl Club members." I think Mattel really should reconsider this one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dennis Dunleavy[Edit][Delete]: Learning How to Teach on the Blogosphere, The Big Picture [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006µ
This is a really good article describing the use of blogging in a journalism class at Southern Oregon University. What I like about it is that it shows so clearly how many of the features talked about by the theorists - the personalization of tone, the holding of media to account, the role of social networking - come into play in actual practice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen J.H. Yang[Edit][Delete]: Context Aware Ubiquitous Learning Environments for Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Learning, Educational Technology and Society [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Wide ranging paper describing a context sensitive peer to peer learning environment, including a "personalized annotation management system, and multimedia real-time group discussion system" and a "context acquisition mechanism for collecting contextual information at run time." This approach underlies a lot of the through currently being expressed in personal learning environments and demonstrates some of the concepts in tangible form. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Warlick[Edit][Delete]: Announcing hitchhikr.com, 2 cents Worth [Edit][Delete]2 Cents Worth [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Dave Warlick has hopped on to the Glu meme, in this case pulling together information from various sources about web conferences. It takes the conference aggregator I created for Merlot in 2003 (and NMC in 2004) one step further, bringing together Flickr images and adding a list of conferences in the right hand column. A good idea, but I have always wanted there to be some sort of conference RSS referencing system that organizers could use to really pull this together, using specific pointers in the XML rather than tags or keywords. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. David Squires[Edit][Delete]: Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Jeremy Hiebert takes us on a welcome trip back to the writings of David Squires. In this item, Squires states the constructivist dilemma quite nicely: "In trying to design effective learning environments we may at the same time constrain the levels of freedom necessary for learners to make decisions about their own learning." His solution, "incorporated subversion," is to build the freedom into the tools. "Rather than design with constraint in mind, design with freedom and flexibility in mind." Hiebert also links us to a Squires interview from 2000 where he describes the Peripatetic Electronic Teachers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Munger[Edit][Delete]: Language and Time: More on Whether the Future is Literally in Front of Us, Cognitive Daily [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
This is worth bringing up, for those who believe that we all perceive one and the same reality. The basics of such a reality are space and time, right? But: "English-speakers have two conflicting representations of time. The 'ego-moving' metaphor suggests that we are moving forward through time, so 'forward' implies a later date. The 'time moving' metaphor suggests that time is like a conveyer belt, on which events move from the future to the past, so 'forward' implies an earlier date." It's easy to say we cannot debate the reality of space and time. But as soon as you press the question as to what these are, our apparent consensus falls apart. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alec Couros[Edit][Delete]: Shoutout, Couros Blog [Edit][Delete] June 19, 2006
Some new blogs: Technology Integration in the Classroom, by George Couros, and The Teaching Life, by Cyril Kestin. Also mailed into me this week was iSean, by Sean Lancaster. And new to me recently was pault@LTG, by Paul Trafford, who wrote an overview of the recent PLE experts' meeting. Also new to me is Mike Malloch's elearning 2.0 blog, highlighted today by Jay Cross. Cross notes, as I would like to as well, Malloch's grasp of the essentials of web 2.0: "The good systems-effects only emerge when usage becomes rich and plentiful - and that depends on an ecology in which the individual parts are simple, focused and easy to get along with, and in which the interoperability architecture makes very lightweight demands on its citizens". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tim Lauer[Edit][Delete]: Google Maps Reads Google Earth Files..., Education/Technology [Edit][Delete] June 19, 2006
As much as I have loved Google Earth, I have always felt limited by the fact that it is a desktop application, which meant that the nifty KML files it uses could not be used on the web. Now at least this capacity exists in Google Maps. Sort of. I tested the system using the instructions posted on the Google website. I first had to set the server's mime types - if your KML files are failing, this is probably why (see the very bottom of the instructions). Then, some of my KML files worked, like this [source]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jay Cross[Edit][Delete]: Not Without Purpose, Internet Time [Edit][Delete] June 19, 2006
Article on informal learning. "Training, development, knowledge management, performance support, informal learning, mentoring, and knowing are all components of performance networks." Good enough. "Networks expand or die." I still don't believe this is true. More...