Durant deux décennies, le BELC a publié des articles, des ouvrages, des études, des outils de créativité qui ont marqué le champ du français langue étrangère et sont devenus des références. Ils constituent un corpus passionnant pour les chercheurs et les didacticiens en sciences du langage et en sciences de l’éducation mais ce fonds d’archives, disponible au centre de ressources du CIEP, était inaccessible pour la majorité d’entre eux. Plus...

Imagine software that creates its own software. That is what machine programming is all about. Like other fields of artificial intelligence, machine programming has been around since the 1950s, but it is now at an inflection point. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 72 Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena
Another optical illusions page. I've been working through the examples over the last few days. What I really like about this site is than not only does it present the now familiar illusions, but that it also provides explanations for the phenomena and links to the scientific papers describing them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Chronicle Spots the Dark Side of Second Life Usage
Bryan Alexander picks up on some more 'fear and trembling' coverage from the Chronicle, this time describing Second Life. "You see someone really playing out the self that they want to explore," she says. "It's not always who they want to be. Sometimes they can be exploring a dark side of themselves." Meanwhile, I've been following the discussion on the Second Life for Educators mailing list on a longer - and very negative - report by Michael J. Bugega in the Chronicle's hidden pages on Second Life. Chris Collins writes, "I'd characterize it as a scare article, and not very well informed." Raven Phoenix writes, " The short bit I was able to read is definitely geared to scare readers about Second Life. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If This Is Your First PLE
Good advice for people just trying to get a handle on what we're all talking about when we talk about PLEs and mash-ups and all that. Essentially, what Tom Haskins describes is a process where you more clearly define what you're interested in, use that definition to find related sources on the web, and then progressively interact with those sources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007
Jane hart has made the PDF of her Top 100 Tools guide available for download. The guide lists the tools by popularity and by category. There is also an alphabetical listing. The resulting listing is, I think, very precise. And what was interesting to me was that the listing by category is essentially a snapshot of what we would think a Personal Learning Environment should look like - a web browser, an RSS reader, a personal start page, an email tool, and the rest. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Disciplinary, National and Institutional Levels to Strategically Improve the Quality of Post-Secondary Education
Though this paper has rather more title than is necessary, it is certainly a worthwhile read, especially if you have an interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at the university level. The vignette the authors use top support the case is worth reading on its own merits, a concise summary of Shulman's analysis 'signature pedagogies' such as clinical rounds in medicines, the legal case in law, the design project in engineering, and homiletics in ministry. This work - which shows that these pedagogies have a bias toward practice - can be used as a platform for the development of greater understanding of teaching in other disciplines. More...