"It Sounds Like Me"
Wheeling University to Bring Back Some Programs
By Elin Johnson. Wheeling University will be bringing back some athletic and academic programs it had decided to temporarily cut this past spring, reports WTOV 9. More...
Money Doesn't Talk - It Silences
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Money Doesn't Talk - It Silences
The title of this post is bang-on. And the rest of the post - which describes a service that will crawl the web, copying site contents, in an attempt to stifle copyright infringement and plagiarism - is also on target. "So if I understand this, they copy web pages to see if they've been copied. And this kind of indexing, unlike the Google library project, doesn't violate anything because media companies might make money from it". More...
I'm thrilled...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I'm thrilled...
George Siemens discovers the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and suggests that there should be "a similar model adopted for research in the learning and technology space." I've thought about this for some time. Except... what is it about the journal model (especially one where authors pay fees) that is superior to what I'm doing now? And if I were to start a journal, what better route than to simply set up a website with the Open Journal Systems software? I'm not trying to rain on the parade. But - I like just posting articles and letting the world decide whether it likes them, wants to reprint them, whatever. More...
Design: Behaviorism Has Its Place
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Design: Behaviorism Has Its Place
I questioned Karl Kapp's behaviorist leanings in a comment recently and this is his reply. "I think the best representation of the effectiveness of behaviorism is Las Vegas, if slots machines are not classic Stimulus-Response-Reward...then nothing is." Well, then, nothing is. It takes a great deal of work to convince people to invest money in what is known to be a losing proposition. That is why Vegas hired Randy Newman and Celine Dion, hosts professional boxing matches, hosts slick television series like CSI, and even popularized a slogan, "What happens in vegas, stays in Vegas." If Vegas replied simply on stiumulus-response, it would be broke by now. Kapp writes, "I think advertising agencies are hoping for stimulus-response." No. What they are hoping for is an association that has nothing to do with the product. Buyer sees beer, buyer thinks sexy woman, buyer buys beer. The 'sexy woman' bit in the middle is an association the marketer has promoted through repetitive associative advertising. More...
Re: Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re: Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution
I know that in BC it is quite possible to graduate from high school without knowing the quadratic formula. So, unless this jurisdiction is more unusual than I think it is, Shank doesn't seem to know his head from a hole in the ground. Of course it will always be true that "We need more people who can think. We need to teach job skills, people skills, and reasoning skills. And we need to make education exciting and interesting." But Shank surrounds these observations with so much incoherent and contradictory posturing that I would consider his polemic virtually useless for persuading anyone who actually does know how to think. For example, his "Here are reasons why" (teaching math and science "better") "is simply the wrong answer"(to the question of "why American kids aren't interested" in science and engineering) is followed not by reasons but by a series of rhetorical questions directed not at that issue but rather at the motives of foreign students - which he does not relate at all to the lack of motives for domestic ones. Then later he says "The right answer would be to make math and science actually interesting" - but isn't that exactly what teaching them "better" would consist of??? But then again, why *is* this the right answer if, as he asserts a bit further on, "What also makes no sense is the idea that math and science are important subjects". More...
Re: Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re: Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution
A part of being able to think well is to be able to make simple mathematical models of reality in your head. Unfortunately, even many of my fellow engineers are unable to do this. A good mathematical education allows you to understand issues in many areas and is even useful in the social sciences. So not only is a mathematical education necessary, and also needs to be taught better (concentrating on modelling rather than rote learning - eg. what would you use a quadratic for),even worse it should probably be included in many fields of study that people have pursued in order to avoid learning any more math. More...
Creativity Costs Money in Second Life
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creativity Costs Money in Second Life
Pretty much my experience in Second Life (and yes, I've put in the hours): "the main education areas are pretty peaceful - no-one but me ever appears to be there. And pretty dull - a few notices and advertising for on-line courses -what is innovative in that. OK - I see some of the universities are developing on-line classrooms. But why?". More...
Re: How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re: How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer
Thank you ever so much for clearly giving an example of RSS and clarifying that it is only a file sitting on the web server. This whole idea of "feeds" had me thinkging that there must be more involved. I will be generating my RSS on the fly with PHP, but I needed this level of simplcity to understand what to do. More...