By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Inventing the New Boundaries
Dave Warlick's chatty keynote (yet another "[verb]ing the new [noun]" talk) opens the second K12 Online Conference. Warlick is mostly a storyteller, though I confess the long bit from Ender's Game and the discussion of borders and airports didn't really appeal to me. "You have to create your own borders," Warlick says, to create traction to move forward into the future. The main message - that the best thing we can be teaching students today is how to teach themselves - is pretty common nowadays, don't you think? Julie Lindsay summarizes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DCMI Scholarly Communications Community
Just announced, "the all new DCMI Community for Scholarly Communications established at the recent DCMI Advisory Board meeting in Singapore. The aim of the group is to provide a central place for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing items of 'scholarly communications', be they research papers, conference presentations, images, data objects." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Real Social Learning or "I Promise, I'M Not a Modernist, Really"
It still feels," writes Scott Leslie, "like we've got a long way to go to catch up with the learning that 4 people 'in flow' around the table can achieve." I think that's true - but I also reflect on how hard that is in real life. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cave Man Didn't Have Classrooms
This article is mostly just entertaining speculation about the way cave man children were taught. But the second-last paragraph really bothers me. "The cave man was probably not conscious," writes Schank, making a sudden right turn. "If we teach to the conscious, if we say how to do something, or worse teach the theory of how something works, rather than show how to do something, we lose the student because his mind does not work that way. If experience is separated from knowledge, if what we teach is not about doing at all, then we teaching to the conscious." This can't be right. Experience is conscious, isn't it? 'Conscious learning' is reflectively aware learning, and is a good thing. I can see the point, that we shouldn't merely use language, that we shouldn't just 'tell' people things. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. URNs, Namespaces and Registries
I read that OpenID 2.0 is moving toward extensible resource identifiers (XRIs), a development that is, well, unclear to me. Danny Ayers recommended this article, which has been kicking around the W3C editorial process since 2001, as a case study of XRI. The first paragraph is very encouraging, and encasulates my objection to CORDRA in a nutshell: "This finding addresses the questions 'When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?' and 'Should registries be provided for such identifiers?'. The answers given are 'Rarely if ever' and 'Probably not'." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reflecting Upon the Difference
Tom Haskins - who writes that "Learning and forgetting are night and day opposites!" - reminds me of a theme I need to develop one day. Learning is not remembering. When Haskins writes "Learning is like clinging to something. Forgetting is like letting go" I think he is saying the opposite of what should be said. Learning, properly construed, is a lot more like 'letting go' than it is like clinging. Think of the 'expert' stage described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus. Think about the advice you read from time to time, about how performance is a matter of 'letting go' of your fears. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. In the Heat of Mocking a Killing Bird
I struggle through Lanny Arvan's posts because he takes a very long time to get to the point (and sometimes never does). I know there's a lot going on in his thinking, but I don't always want all of it when he wants to say something. That said, sometimes the style works very well, at times when it's important to bring disparate threads together. And you can find the point in there, eventually, that in order to teach one thing using role playing with technology, "we have to be overtly about some other use of role playing with technology or some other use of the technology itself." The misdirection - what Larry Pausch described as the 'head fake' in his farewell lecture - is depicted as essential to the teaching of difficult social issues such as racism. Now this may be true - but the much more interesting question is why. This, I think has to do with learning being about experiencing, not telling, and it has to do with education being about what interests the student, not the teacher. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Diamonds in the Mud
Coverage of the Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2007) conference provided by Steve Wheeler (part one, part two, part three). Summaries could be more informative and less, um, colourful ("two papers that shone out like diamonds in the mud in an afternoon of mediocrity"). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
"What's popular?" asks George Siemens. "Tools that aren't broadcast-based: flickr (image sharing), social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo), personal information management (del.icio.us), and collaborative tools like wikis." What's not popular, he notes, are things that are used for broadcasting. Yahoo, for example, closed its podcast directory. He writes, "The initial rush of 'wow, I can post my comments on the web to the world' has given way to 'wow, I don't feel like it'." And thus he links to this article that documents our move from real places to 'lifestyle' places to "discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends." All very good, but I wouldn't over-emphasize the social. I think the social is one type of experience, and that life is filled with many more types of experience. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Convergence or Divergence?
You should probably have a look at this post if you're interested in the business or commercial aspects of online learning. Essentially, the suggestion is that enterprises we had always thought of as conjoined - product development, say, and customer service - are actually very different enterprises. Fair enough, and I think that some of the functions in online learning (teaching and testing, say) could also be diverged. I talked about that in 1998. But I think readers of this post should also be cautious. There's some good thinking here, but it is buried in a sea of bafflegab (because what Hagel really wants you to do is buy his report). There's no need for this. Hagel is describing commerce which is both convergent (it brings things from multiple sources together) and divergent (innovation, production, transportation, marketing and sales are handled by different entities). More...