By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Atanu Dey[Edit][Delete]: Who Actually Paid For My Education?, [Edit][Delete] December 14, 2006
I commented not long ago on an article from the NY Times on education in India. Here's an Indian perspective: "It is the poor rural children, thousands of them, who paid for my education by losing their opportunity to become semi-literate. The system is tilted against them and unless there is a radical change in the way that education is funded, they will continue to pay the price for subsidizing the US for decades to come." Be sure to see the rest of the blog for commentary on the false bottom of the pyramid, scepticism about the OLPC (0ne laptop per child) project, and the high cost of connectivity in India. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Meet the Editors, ascilite 2006 conference podcasts [Edit][Delete] December 14, 2006
From the Ascilite conference: "Roger Atkinson, Catherine McLoughlin, Grainne Conole and John Hedberg pointed aspiring researchers-looking-to-be published in the right direction to get published and to gain those all important DEST points, citations, and all the other measurables..." Of course. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ed Moltzen[Edit][Delete]: Linux's Education Push, School CIO [Edit][Delete] December 14, 2006
According to this article, "It looks like the education space could be the first, real place where Linux could grab beachhead in the desktop PC market." Though teachers and administrators have more experience with Windows, students don't have the same history, and when it comes down to paying for software out of their own pocket, they will opt for Linux. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chris Anderson[Edit][Delete]: What Would Radical Transparency Mean for Wired? (Part 2), Long Tail [Edit][Delete] December 14, 2006
Chris Anderson gives the upsides and risks of six principles of open publishing: "All staff edit their own personal 'about' pages; Show what we're working on; Share the reporting as it happens; Give comments equal status to the story they're commenting on; Let readers decide what's best; Wikifiy everything." I do some of these, and not others. I am pretty open about process. As for comments, I allow then, anonymously, even, but when it comes down to it I figure readers can post comments in their own blog, just like me. Same with deciding what's best and wikifying. I don't need to 'let' readers to this, they can do it on their own (and I provide the RSS feed and licensing to enable it). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Web 2.0, E-Learning 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments, December 14, 2006

PowrePoint Slides and MP3 Audio (my side only) of a presentation I gave this afternoon, as pictured above, from my home using Centra. I used a working draft of an article I'm writing on network learning and personal learning environments. [Tags: E-Learning 2.0, Personal Learning Environment, Networks, Web 2.0, Podcasting, Flickr]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meredith Henson[Edit][Delete]: ePortfolio Project and Mahara Update, Eduforge [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
The ePortfolio project called Mahara has released its first iteration on EduForge, with a second to follow shortly. Documentation for the project , includingy a PowerPoint presentation. You can can also learn about the project here and at a post on Seb Schmoller's website. 'Mahara' is Te Reo Maori for "`thought' (think, memory, think upon, remember). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jorge Goncalves[Edit][Delete]: Thumbstacks.com - Making and Sharing Presentations on the Web, Learning Online Info [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
This is pretty interesting - it is a bit like S5 combined with a Web 2.0-ish authoring tool. In essence, it allows you to create web-based slide shows. The authoring tool mostly doesn't work on my home system (Firefox 2.0 and Ubuntu Eft) - it just bogs down and eventually stops responding - but will work on most systems. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Small Talk[Edit][Delete]: Closing NY High Schools, more on KIPP, Mike Klonsky [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
It's not clear why the two items are in the same post, but what caught my eye was the follow-up on KIPP, the school program profiled in the New York Times by Paul Tough (my coverage here). It's the third in a series of reaction pieces (the first two are also worth a look: first, second). In this, a cite from a post by North Dakota Study Group listserv writer Harold Berlak, confirms some of my reservations. He writes, "This one [the KIPP school] felt like a humane, low security prison or something resembling a locked-down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will Thalheimer[Edit][Delete]: Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers, Will at Work Learning [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006

The diagram in this post is a lot more insightful than may be grasped at first glance. Here is the diagram:

The point Will Thalheimer is trying to make is that "any assessment at the end of the first learning curve is likely to be a poor predictor of future remembering---and show a definite positive bias." Why is that? Well, when learning is tested in the same context it was taught, it is more easily recalled. But introduce the learner to new contexts, and a chaos of variables intervene, making the previous predictions unreliable.

A 'chaos of variables'? That's being a little liberal with the language, don't you think? Well, maybe not. Take a look at this diagram:

It's called a bifurcation diagram, and it is part of a theory, chaos theory, that describes what happens in dynamic non-linear systems. As we can see, there occurs, at the beginning, what appears to be a nice linear path, but this breaks down into a wide range of possibilities after a certain threshold. So why does this matter? Well, the short version is, if you want to know how your learning is performing, then you need to evaluate after the threshold point. The longer version is that there are implications across the board in our profession. To get a sense, look at this article on categorization in dynamic systems. How naive static systems of metadata and taxonomies look after that. But not just those: consider static theories describing learning designs, learning content, learning management and assessment. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kruse[Edit][Delete]: New Rules, Gangrey [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
This is a neat idea. "If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats - cops, city hall, school board - and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories... WHAT? What would the 'beats' be?" Some great suggestions, including: "People who keep their baby teeth in tiny boxes. People in their 30s and 40s who work for minimum wage. People who wear sweatsuits." And some better ones, too. Imagine we rewrote the curriculum from scratch. Ditched math, geography, science, music. What would we study? Piezoelectronics? Ecosystems. More...