By Rick Seltzer. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education will be able to seek as much as $100 million over five years above and beyond its regular state funding requests after its board approved a measure Thursday to try to fund parts of a closely watched redesign effort. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re: Design: Behaviorism Has Its Place
"stimulus response" is really a very poor description of behaviourism. A more appropriate description is adaptation of organism with environment. I didn't think anyone with an interest in behaviourism was that concerned with basic SR. SR is part of the mechanisms by which adaptation occurs. Its not the only mechanism. The point about behavioural science isn't whether its "true" - thats for religions, not science - but that it has genuinely useful predictive power within a certain scope, just like any other paradigms in psychology, or any other discipline. oh, and a better example than Vegas is the pokies in the hotel down the road. We know variable reinforcement schedules do work - it just isn't the whole story (or life would be very boring). But then, this is science generally - we still use Newton's laws, even though we know they only tell part of the story (relativity adds a bit more accuracy, quantum mechanics a bit more, and then the rest is chaos). I think you'd be hard pressed to find any psychologist who would deny the value of behavioural science or the accuracy of its experimental results. No more than you'd find a physicist who is a "Newton-denier". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jody Clark and Chris Dede[Edit][Delete]: Robust Designs for Scalability, The River City Project [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
Chris Dede has been working on MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) recently and though he has been, with various partners, writing a lot, he's hard to track because he unfortunately has not yet discovered RSS. Still, you'll want to have a look at this paper, in part because it addresses what is in my mind a critical issue for MUVEs, scalability (I contend that as long as they depend critically on human instructors, they don't scale; Dede focuses mostly on the technology and how to get (mostly unwilling) instructors into the environment in the first place), but also in part because of the mathematical renderinsg of the "effect size" and the "'ccalability Index' that estimates the relative sensitivity of innovations to attenuation in various dimensions that represent their conditions for success." I like MUVEs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Andy Gibbons and Clint Rogers[Edit][Delete]: Selection of Quotations on Design Languages and Their Relation to Design Layers, ITForum [Edit][Delete] November 21, 2006
This is a very interesting paper. The premise is that the process of, say, instructional design involves the participants in the creation of a 'design language' - a set of terms, metaphors, meanings and images - that will characterize their project. Design language is best thought of as a tool, rather than a theory. It is typically applied in layers, with different representations of entities in the design relating to different aspects of that design. I think the authors finesse the incommensurability of theoretical language, and I think their description of the layers in instructional design shouldn't separate the message and the representation (here I'm thinking of McLuhan and Derrida). More...