By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Holo-Emitter for Second Life
It must be the philosopher in me, but I can't help asking about the ontological status of a hologram produced inside a virtual world like Second Life. Never mind questions like 'is it real?' or not - can it even be said to 'exist'? What is existence, if that exists. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Commentary: Which Name Is Better - Serious Games or Educational Simulations Or...?
Most of the names suggested for what we most often see named 'serious games' are non-starters. I mean, 'Social Impact Games'? 'Practiceware'? Forget it. We could call them 'serious games', except as Aldrich notes, "Sponsors hate it; instructors from academics, corporate, and military hate it..." I hate it too - why should learning (or business, etc) always be characterized as 'serious'? Me, I think the category is too young to take on a name. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Opposing View: NCLB Fails Our Schools
I don't know why this is called the 'opposing' view - it seems to be prevailing wisdom by now. But I guess we're still waiting for an autonomous press. Anyhow, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson writes, "I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it." I am inclined to agree. From where I sit (and admittedly, that's somewhere outside the building) it seems to me that NCLB is a large exercise undertaken in lieu of actually funding education. It's a way to distract attention from the low teacher salaries, the unequal allocation of funds across divisions, the lack of investment in equipment and resources, and the general abdication of government responsibility for education. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007
Jane hart has made the PDF of her Top 100 Tools guide available for download. The guide lists the tools by popularity and by category. There is also an alphabetical listing. The resulting listing is, I think, very precise. And what was interesting to me was that the listing by category is essentially a snapshot of what we would think a Personal Learning Environment should look like - a web browser, an RSS reader, a personal start page, an email tool, and the rest. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Disciplinary, National and Institutional Levels to Strategically Improve the Quality of Post-Secondary Education
Though this paper has rather more title than is necessary, it is certainly a worthwhile read, especially if you have an interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at the university level. The vignette the authors use top support the case is worth reading on its own merits, a concise summary of Shulman's analysis 'signature pedagogies' such as clinical rounds in medicines, the legal case in law, the design project in engineering, and homiletics in ministry. This work - which shows that these pedagogies have a bias toward practice - can be used as a platform for the development of greater understanding of teaching in other disciplines. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Developing and Assessing Undergraduate Students' Moral Reasoning Skills
I'm including this paper because I enjoyed it - that must be the philosopher in me coming out, even though I am not deeply into moral philosophy. The teaching of moral philosophy, on the other hand, is something that catches my interest, because it raises the question of how we address a topic in which there is no 'right answer'. The author fails to find progress in 'moral reasoning' after teaching the course the standard way, by surveying the usual variety of moral philosophies. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
The July issue is now available online and carries a very mixed bag of articles. The quality is quite uneven. I've linked to a couple I liked (below) after reading a half dozen or so - I found two of the three invited papers (Cambridge and Kwo) to be quite weak, while the refereed papers varied from reading like a testimonial (Gilpin) to yet another study of a few graduate students (de Freitas) to a study of physical modeling activities that felt (to me, at least) quite dated (Fenci and Huenink) - I mean, I remember reading about the rods in Holt (1964). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will the the Future of the Internet Be Free?
With the release of the Google Flight Simulater as an 'Easter Egg' inside Google Earth last week, you can be forgiven for thinking, as Bill St. Arnauld suggests, that the future of the internet lies in free, not commercial, applications. In his email newsletter, St. Arnauld points to a couple other items that reinforce this point, Andrew Odlyzko writing Digital rights management: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant, and Paul Budde on meeting John Ralston Saul. "The inclusion of Intellectual Property into the WTO is severely hampering the flow of new ideas and information; it is attempting to control the dissemination of ideas, thus making the spread and sharing of them increasingly difficult. This is damaging the new economy!" Well, not just that. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understanding Internet Architecture, a Need for Smarter Networks, TCP and UDP Differences
I'm not going to do justice to Wesley Fryer's long discussion of network architectures. But I do want to key on a theme in the title (and found throughout the article) that suggests that the network can somehow be 'managed' to be more efficient. I think that is a fallacy. In general, the most efficient systems involve 'stupid' networks and 'smart' objects (rather than 'smart' networks and 'stupid' objects). Let me give some examples: the road system is a stupid network, as compared to the rail system, which is a smart - but inefficient - network. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 Slam - Performing Innovative Practice
There was a fair amount of coverage around the blogosphere of last week-end's Alt-C conference, which was held in Nottingham. In particular, a number of writers commented on the 'Web 2.0 Slam' session, which consisted partially of a description of Web 2.0 technologies and partially of chaos as people developed their own creation. More...
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