9 avril 2019

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EDUCAUSE Podcast on Project Governance
D'Arcy Norman links to this podcast by Lisa Kosanovich on project governance. The talks starts out pretty well. She describes administrivia, that sort of project management that drives us all nuts, as "a more reactive approach to problems that arise" and tracable to things like design problems "being resolved in a vacuum". Her four principles of project management seem sound to me: assigning roles and responsibilities, creating a change management and scope steward, setting out communication rules, and setting up schedule tools and principles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IST-EC 2
Just announced: "IST-EC 2 (Information Societies Technologies Europe-Canada) is a joint Canada-Europe project whose objective is to connect the European and Canadian research communities in key areas of the Information Society Technologies (IST)... Under the project, Canadian and European research and technology developers from both the public and private sectors (university, research centers or SME’s), can search for joint projects in which to participate on the basis of mutual benefits." There is an e-learning component to the project, which described in full on the web page. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design
I think metaphor is the foundation of human reason (more accurately, I think similarity is the foundation of human reason). So it should be no surprise that I would be interested in Dan Saffer's essay on the role of metaphor in interaction design. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Anticipating Autopoiesis: Personal Construct Psychology and Self-Organizing Systems
Seb Fiedler hits on a nice article that draws out some implications of the psychological theory of constructivism, a theory which holds, essentially, that our understanding of the world is a creative act. "There is no event which could be called 'stark reality' because there is no event which we cannot reconstrue alternately." What's important is how we undertake this process (c.f. my remarks on similarity, below). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-for-all
Three cheers for the Dutch! As the Register reports, "Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused." Personally, I don't care whether they are amused. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Filling up Experiences at the Online Learning Filling Station
Like Derek Morrison, I have rolled my eyes at the thought of using a PDA, this after my less than fruitful experience with an iPaq a few years ago. I wonder whether my thoughts would change with one of the newer devices. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Overkill on Copyright Law
This editorial is typical of the reams of criticism piled on recent legislation passed in the United States, Attached as a little-noticed rider to a bill allowing families to filter offensive content, the new measure imposes harsh penalties on people copying and distributing movies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Age of Engagement
The funniest slide - slide 15 - rewrites Maslow's hierarchy to incorporate the desire for connectivity. The slide reflects the tone of this otherwise serious, and dauntingly documented, look at the bright, bright future of the internet. According to The Age of Engagement, the impact of the internet is just starting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Your Identity, Open to All
In light of my recent comments on identity, this item seemed relevant. The author describes a product called ZabaSearch, which finds "a wealth of info sometimes dating back more than 10 years: residential addresses, phone numbers both listed and unlisted, birth year, even satellite photos of people's homes." There is much discussion of how freely available this information is, and how unreliable it is. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mon Wiki Dieu!
If you have been looking for French language educational content, look no further; this posts links to a site linking 133 of them. The author also writes, "And I got there from Mario Asselin's wiki at his school Institut St-Joseph. It looks like the whole school is wiki-ed up." I'm not surprised; this is the same school I profiled in last's year's Educational Blogging in EDUCAUSE Review - the same issue of which contained Brian Lamb's Wiki Ready or Not. More...