Histoire

[link: Hits] Will Richardson talks about the trend toward change sweeping through the academic blogosphere. As David Wiley comments, "The notion of teacher as DJ may have been implied when people started applying the 'rip-mix-burn' metaphor to education, but lately I can't seem to get it out of my head." Yeah. Richardson adds, "But there's no doubt there is an energy around all of this right now, an urgency even. I'm feeling it in my own life, not just in the education sense but in a more global sense. What difference do I really want to make? What contribution?"

Quite so, and I find myself asking the same questions. And concluding that 2006 will be, of necessity, a year of change for me. More...

Firefox 3: From HTML Renderer To Information Broker
Good article describing the (coming) intersection of the web browser and microformats. I've covered microformats before: these are little snippets of XHTML that define information structures in web pages. More...

Happy New Year
I am home from Ottawa. This year I will spend New Year's Eve in a comedy club.
2006 was a year of extremes for me. It was a difficult year, but only because it was one where I tried to live my life to the fullest, and I guess I can't regret that. I made memories to last a lifetime, I touched so many places and so many lives, and was more than rewarded in kind.
I dreamed last night that I was given a fine suit, a thousand dollar suit that I would never buy for myself, with a silk scarf and a long overcoat, that when I wore it I looked like and felt like I had found my success in this life. I trimmed my hair, just a bit, to match the suit, and when I walked down the road, I strode forward with a flourish, waving the tail of my coat behind me.
Kia ora. Thank you, to all of you, and best wishes for the coming year. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web December 29, 2006 [Link] [Comment]. More...

A Lifesaving Checklist
Things that seem really obvious aren't always so. And though it comes from the field of medicine, this debate over the use of checklists is illustrative. The story, in brief, is that a hospital decided to try using checklists to ensure proper procedures are followed, and were following up by evaluating the results to see whether it worked. More detail here. More...

Last Year's eLearn Magazine Predictions
Everybody's looking forward to the future. I look to the past - last year's predictions of the future. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour January 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]. More...

Predictions for 2010
Bubblegum edupunk, consulting cartels, and the arrival of the big touch - great predictions for 2010. More...

Mini-Lectures Using Learning Objects: Bosch's The Haywain (1516)
Susan Smith Nash, E-Learning Queen, May 9, 2014
Janet Clarey comments, "I love this for its simplicity." It is a set of mini-lessons offered by Susan Smith Nash, each one small and self-contained, using learning objects the way (I think) they were intended to be used. More...

20th Century Assessment In A 21st Century Learning Environment
Terry Heick, TeachThought, May 2, 2014
Why is there so much emphasis (still!) on testing? "According to SmarterBalanced.org, the per-student cost for testing is currently around $31 per student. Multiply that by nearly fifty million students, and you’ve got a big pile of money up for grabs. More...