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27 septembre 2019

Birthplace of Blackboard Comments On Patent Issue

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Birthplace of Blackboard Comments On Patent Issue
The birthplace of Blackboard, Cornell University, is considering its options. "When Blackboard announced their patent it did cause us to begin an assessment of whether we wanted to move away from Blackboard ... It did cause us to rethink whether we wanted to use their product". More...

27 septembre 2019

Time Out

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time Out
Um... one wonders what to make of this. In EDNA groups recently: "As requested by our members we have now set up a 'Time Out' area..." Yes, this appears to be serious. Now I certainly understand why it has been done - I've seen examples of rude behaviour in the forums. What I wonder is whether this is an artifact of the forums being locked behind a subscription wall. And I wonder whether there's a better approach. More...

27 septembre 2019

Relearning Learning-Applying the Long Tail to Learning

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Relearning Learning-Applying the Long Tail to Learning
I couldn't play this (Totem plays utterly nothing and the whole system of dysfunctional media players is one of the most frustrating things about Linux) but I know people will want to see this. "Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core 'that gets at the essence of critical thinking,' paired with 'passion-based learning,' where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects". More...

27 septembre 2019

Movie Piracy Claims More Fiction Than Fact

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Movie Piracy Claims More Fiction Than Fact
According to a "steady stream" of news articles, Canada is one of the hotbeds of movie piracy. The problem with this 'news' is that it is based mostly on fiction. The percentage of movies camcorded is overstated. The financial impact of camcorded copies is exaggerated. Suggestions that the law doesn't deal with camcording are simply wrong. More...

27 septembre 2019

Media Education Kit Published by UNESCO

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Media Education Kit Published by UNESCO
Pretty good and comprehensive media awareness kit, beginning with the nature and impact of traditional media and continuing through to many internet services and practices. Worth noting is the authors' extensive use of Wikipedia in the internet section. Also new to me was the story of how Celestin Freinet introduced a printing press to his classroom and watched as the students took it upon themselves to learn the art of newspaper production. "The pupils wrote down their own personal adventures, the incidents that they had experienced inside and outside the classroom, and so on. Usually these texts were then presented to the class, discussed, corrected and edited by the class as a whole before being finally printed by the children themselves working together. Freinet called this approach Free Writing ('Texte libre')". More...

27 septembre 2019

New Criteria for New Media

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Criteria for New Media
The thesis is that traditional criteria for assessment - such as publication in traditional journals - is inadequate for evaluation of work done in new media, partially because of the medium but mostly because of the time lag before publication. Alternatives suggested are invited publications, conference presentations, citations, downloads and influence. Sounds good to me. There is also an expanded version of this paper in wiki form, waiting for your contributions. More...

27 septembre 2019

Collaborative Building in Second Life

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Collaborative Building in Second Life
This video is a very good demonstration of how an environment like Second Life can be useful (and no, it doesn't have a single lecture theatre of video screen in it). (P.S. the author of this blog continues to remain anonymous - making me wonder whether it's marketing rather than a real blog. More...

27 septembre 2019

2007 PreK-12 Educational Publishing Outlook

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 2007 PreK-12 Educational Publishing Outlook
Summary of a webinar held yesterday surveying outlooks for educational publishing. Interesting to note Leslie Wilson's observation that "There is a three year learning curve in instituting one to one computing into schools" and "Students feel more effective, they enjoy schoolwork more... [they] are doing more collaborative activities, more problem solving, they debate and question more, they integrate subjects areas better, and they discuss schoolwork with other students more. Test scores are significantly higher." So? As Gail Pierson says, "The Riverdeep/Houghton-Mifflin vision is that adoptions and larger contracts are requiring the winner to provide a solution that integrates both core curriculum and supplemental content, while also providing pacing calendars, curriculum and lesson planners (with content accessible from the planner), differentiated instruction, single sign-on, flexible print/online content with capabilities to change the lesson sequence and to fragment content, and content accessible from the district portal". More...

27 septembre 2019

The Future Begins Now: School 2.0 Manifesto

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Future Begins Now: School 2.0 Manifesto
Christopher D. Sessums begins the process of creating a School 2.0 manifesto, and while I applaud the initiative I caution that such a manifesto would need to be more than just a rehash of Cluetrain. And also, it needs to make sense. "Schools are people," he writes. Well, no, schools are not people. And it's going to have to take into account the balance between the inner world and the outer world. When you say "Learning is a social activity... It is built upon conversations" you are discounting the learning that happens in one's own mind - indeed, are misunderstanding the nature of learning itself, which is the development of new neural structures. Maybe he means to say, "The best learning is social..." but now we are in rather tenuous territory. More...

27 septembre 2019

Planet

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Planet
Via Alexander Hayes, who writes about a 'river of news' created with Planet. "Planet is an awesome 'river of news' feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first. It uses Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser to read from RDF, RSS and Atom feeds; and Tomas Styblo's templating engine to output static files in any format you can dream up." So it's written in Python and is, of course, open source. More...

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