By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Distance Educators and Dogma
Terry Anderson weighs in on some long-standing disputes in distance education. The first pits access against effectiveness: while technology may improve effectiveness, the purpose of distance education is to provide access, and many people do not have access to technology. The second questions the effectiveness of technology by challenging its empirical basis. Anderson essentially bites th bullet on access, conceeding that "there are learners on the trap lines in Northern Canada without even dial-up connectivity or electricity". And on effectiveness he argues that we need to redefine the criteria; "If we think of more general learning outcomes of education as a whole, the rationale for Net learning becomes more apparent." I agree with this, but I don't think he needs to give any ground on access. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning Showcase
After listing new applications daily for a few months, Jane Hart is also listing e-learning 'solutions' that she has run across. This could be really interesting if it were run as a regular feature (though that said my experience from running the NAWeb Awards is that most e-learning is behind a login wall, safely hidden from critical eyes). Of course, if she were to post examples of e-learning on anything like a regular basis, she could well experience the application fatigue that is no doubt beginning to colour her Web 2.0 application perspective. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IEEE Trial-Use Recommended Practice for Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs) Suitable for eLearning Technologies
IEEE Std 1484.4-2007 published on 14 September 2007. This standard is the result of work by the Digital Rights Expression Language subcommittee. Neither ODRL nor XrML became 'the standard'; rather, what you'll see is a mapping of 'best practices' to three digital rights expression languages. My own view is that it is too early in the game to propose any standard at all. But as I have commented in the past, these standards committees are heavily biased towards passage of proposed standards, so I think that a non-specific mapping might have been the best the committee could do under the scope set out by the rules. As is the practice of IEEE, the standard is unavailable for download; you have to buy it from them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning 2.0 in Development
I'm going to keep today's newsletter short as I have just finished my talk from this morning and have nother session this afternoon. This is the link to the slides from my talk today at the Brandon Hall conference. I have audio, but it's locked in a Windows-only recording device. The conference has a Technorati tag, a Flickr group and a Twitter tag. janet Clarey has a short comment from the talk; so does Harold Jarche. Stephen Downes, Slideshare September 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Audio, Newsletters, E-Learning 2.0, Microsoft, Flickr, Technorati]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Links to E-Learning, Teaching and Learning Activity
This is a useful service - but the problem is you're submitting your stuff to their database. I have always felt that conference information should be posted as RSS feeds, that can then be aggregated by any service that wants to list the conferences. Anyhow, we see links to teaching and learning conferences, as well as e-learning conferences. Though personally I think that the conference lists published by Clayton R. Wright (and posted here) are more complete. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Toward a Model of Experiential E-Learning
This is an interesting enough paper in that it nicely summarizes experiential e-learning (sometimes called EE Learning), grounding it in the work of people like Carver and Cantor, who writes that "experiential education involves learning activities in which the student is directly engaged in the phenomena being studied." The author offers a taxonomy, which could be easily extended with a little reflection, and identifies as central concepts things like agency, belongingness and competence. The example offered is a bit of a stretch, though: the author describes graduate student engaging in EE learning by participating in the creation of an online course. While I appreciate recursion jokes as much as the next person, I thought this was a bit much. More...