By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MIT Students Pull Prank on Conference
Everyone has gotten a good giggle over this one. A group of computer science students created a random essay generator, printed out a random essay, and got it accepted at an academic conference. Read the fine print and you see it was accepted as an "unrefereed submission". But still. Pretty funny. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Botany Photo of the Day
Because it's a slow news day (a Friday in April - does it get any better?) and because I like things like this. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It's a Flat World, After All
This is a great article, one that addresses the newly level playing field worldwide created by the internet and open source, among other things. The sort of level playing field that allows me to read this article in my living room, free of charge, and to send it to people I know in India, Australia and South America, where "a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want." And while the author depicts it (accurately) as a challenge to America, I view it (also accurately) as an opportunity for the rest of the world. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Exemplary Online Educators: Creating a Community of Inquiry
What makes some online educators more effective than others? Using Garrison, Anderson and Archer's Community of Inquiry model as a framework, this paper undertakes a qualitative study of the question. "Online learning is not just a learning enhancement," write the authors, "it is an entirely new way of learning and teaching that is likely here to stay." Maybe, but the preliminary results from the study will sound familiar to anyone: effective online instructors are "challengers", they are "affirmers" and they are "influencers". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Go Test Go
Greg Hodgins wrote in to let me know about Go Tests Go, a service that provides online tresting to Java enabled mobile phones. Tests are geared toward professional or scholastic test or exams, such as foreign language certification and are used by students for practice. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Slim – Inexpensive – Transparent
Inteview with Martin Röll, a Luxembourger blogger living in Dreden and producer of Das E-Business Weblog and various publications on the topic. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CMS interoperability?
Good overview of Content Management System (CMS) interoperability, a problem that will continue to grow as the number of CMSs increases. The author notes, "there still needs to be a common standard for the information itself, if meaningful interoperability is to be achieved. It is here that the difficulties arise, due to the lack of any consensus standards in this area." Quite right, and this is the one area of online learning standards development that has puzzled me - where have IMS, SCORM and the others been on a specification for learning objects themselves. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. BlogPulse Conversation Tracker
Will Richardson reports on the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, a system that combines discrete weblog posts into a coherent conversation. Here, for example, is a somewhat disjointed conversation arising out of BloggerCon. Or another one on the Kryptonite bike lock saga. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Homegrown Single Sign On at UM - St. Louis
I enjoyed this presentation on the various iterations of a single sign-on system at a university (I loved Phase II - you have a single user ID, but you still have to log on to each application separately - which led immediately to Phase III). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brian Lamb, Learning Objects, Wikis, Flickr, RSS-- They Wanted it All (No Fooling)
As Alan Levine writes, "we got some good things going here." Brian Lamb is dishing out learning chaotic style and people are eating it up. Good presentation summary with numerous links to resources, wiki pages and other arcania. More...
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