Social Software: What's New
What's new, asks the author, about social software? After all, online community formation is nothing Usenet, MUDs and email haven't been doing for years. But social software (properly construed) takes advantage of the web in ways these others technologies missed. More...
Wikis
A somewhat Hegelian view of the wiki, but a view worth reading nonetheless. The author exclaims in pain about the educational use of wiki, "from what I've observed in scholarly discussions on the subject, most teachers "using wikis in the classroom" are so far off the mark that I am at a loss whether to laugh or cry. When I read these reports, it's like reading about how someone completely and utterly failed to use their shiny new Ferrari to properly tow a horse trailer." So how should it be used. More...
E-Learning in Easy Pieces
So I spent the week-end recovering from jet lag and listening to hours and hours of audio. The archiving is going well, though I am reaching disk space limits on both my laptop and my website. Who knew disk space labled in gigabytes would be too small? Anyhow, for those who can't wait for the full archive, here's a teaser, my talk from Darwin. Click here for the audio - 1.5 hours, 11.2 megabytes (clicking on the title gets you the slides). Now I'm off to NAWeb, another talk, then home to rest for a couple of weeks. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, October 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...
Gotchas in Using Computer Simulations
Albert Ip reflects on an item posted here yesterday, Computer Simulations in Distance Education. In that article, the author identifies several "problems" with similuations; Ip prefers to think of these as "issues we should prepare for." Ip also notes that the "'constructivistic' paradigm does not equal to throwing the learners into the deep end of the pool and let them swim or die. Scaffolding is a common technique in providing help (and progressively take away support when the learners become more confident)." This is something you see in games a lot, where there will be easier levels, or even training areas, that allow the usewr to master the gameplay bit by bit. More...
Why You'll Really Want WiMax
I read this item on the bus home from Fredericton last night touting, in Wired's usual restrained style, the next big thing in wireless access, WiMax, or the 802.16 wireless specification. Operating at below 11 Gigahertz, WiMax doesn't require line-of-site and can reach distances of 30 miles (50 kilometers) at 75 megabits per second (by contrast, the standard 802.11b wireless card runs at 11 megabits, and your ethernet local area network runs at 100). More...
E-Books: Challenges and Opportunities
A look at the current state of e-books, with an in-depth examination of the use of Safari, an e-book service owned jointly by Pearson Education and O'Reilly that provides about 2000 titles. More...
Rip. Mix. Feed. Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies
Absolutely outstanding presentation prepared by Brian Lamb and Alan Levine for EDUCAUSE (in the form of a wiki, so if you don't like it you can change it). The key message: "There's been too much focus on schemas and models for cataloging objects and precious little attention to building meaningful content. Thankfully, there are some signs of change." And the change is coming at the speed of a freight train, which will leave a lot of vendors in the dust if they're not careful. More...
Organisational Issues in eLearning
Found via an Auricle article summarizing my talk in Perth, this set of slides by Rob Koper both reinforces and offers an interesting take on the idea of learning networks. Drawing from work in small words theory, Koper proposes modelling learning networks as a graph where the learning is a set of 'activity nodes' within some knowledge domain (what I would call an environment). More...
Agent Support for Online Learning
In a sense, this is the 'other' way to approach the discovery and organization of online materials: through the use of agents. This paper describes the use of agents in an educational environment, "It is our claim that well-chosen software technologies, involving agents, can raise the self-organising powers of the network sufficiently to make a LN [Learning Networks] a viable option." Why do I call this the 'other' approach? It's not clear to me at this point that something as complex as an agent is required; I think that the network may be more robust than anticipated. More...
EDUCAUSE 2004
EDUCAUSE 2004 is taking place in Denver right now and is being blogged by numerous writers. I'm not going to try to summarize a lot (at least, not much beyond the observation that EDUCAUSE seems to have discovered open source in a big way). More...
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