By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Questioning the Student Use of and Desire for Lecture Podcasts
The authors conclude, " Although iPods and other MP3 players are common with students, the use of audio files as an educational device is still debated and has not undergone rigorous pedagogical research." Well fine. Of course, they are surveying whether students at Duke - who have already paid the gazillions in tuition fees and are actually on campus - listen to lecture podcasts. And sometimes they do. But I just think this is researching the wrong thing. What I want to know is, what is the effectiveness of a podcast compared to, say, nothing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CREST+ Model: Writing Effective Online Discussion Questions
I think the acronym is a bit cutesy, but I like this discussion of question types and methodologies. We don't see a lot on question formation, but a good survey of recent work is provided in the introduction. As for the CREST+ model itself, it is mostly a taxonomy of question types. So far so good, but we want to be more probing. What do we do with different types of questions? What effects do they have? Questions don't merely query, they also frame discussions. They create some possibilities, eliminate others. What happens when these possibilities exceed the bounds of experience. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Testing An Experimental Universally Designed Learning Unit in a Graduate Level Online Teacher Education Course
I liked this paper partially because the survey size of 216 was substantially larger than most in our field (larger, for example, than the surveys of 24 and 38 in the same issue of JOLT) and partially because the authors were responsible enough to say "the sample size was too small to extrapolate too much from the results." Quite so. But they say, and I agree, that "having over 85% 'SJ' population within a sample of teachers" stands out. Now of course every time somebody mentions learning styles, someone else squawks that there is no evidential basis for learning styles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Correspondence On Digital Archives and ePortfolios
Helen Barrett receives an email from Mike Caulfield describing an Inverted LMS, which turns out to be the PLE, independently discovered. More here. She also gets a note from a graduate student, who writes, "I'm trending towards the view that the system we will end up with will use RSS to expose content, tags to organize it, and open ID to selectively share content with certain people." Yes, as people look at the potential of online technology, they begin reaching similar conclusions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. JISC RepositoryNet
JISC has launched RepositoryNet to bring together four JISC-funded projects: Repositories Support Project; The Depot, a repository for UK researchers; Intute: Repository Search; Repositories Research Team. "The aim of JISC RepositoryNet is to help form an interoperable network of repositories. It will do this by providing UK universities and colleges with access to trusted and expert information about repositories and by supporting some key services that form building blocks for a network of repositories. By working together, sharing practice and implementing common standards, UK universities and colleges can help to improve access to research and learning and to manage and curate their output. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. HP and MIT Create Non-Profit Organization to Support Growing Community of DSpace Users
MIT and Hewlett-Packard are creating foundation for DSpace, the MIT brand of Open Archive Initiative (OAI) software. According to the HP press release, "Jointly developed by HP and the MIT Libraries beginning in 2002, today more than 200 projects worldwide are using the software to digitally capture, preserve and share their artifacts, documents, collections and research data." More from Peter Suber here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Edubloggers As Prisoners of the Nation State.
Artichoke revisits my critique of school 2.0 from a couple months ago (which makes me happy, because it went largely unremarked by the school 2.0 crowd). She writes, "If Illich could imagine a good education system - one that didn't need schools and classrooms in 1971, why do we keep pretending we need schools and classrooms to learn in 2007". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Citizen Media: A Progress Report
Worthwhile and studiously accurate summation of the state of the (news) media at this point of the information revolution. I agree with Gillmor's assessment: "We need much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain - and some notable failures are discouraging". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Putting Canadian "Piracy" in Perspective - The Sources
The video isn't that great, and I hate the background music, but the story it tells is worth the ten minutes. In a nutshell, the numerous reports we have been reading in Canadian and other media about how Canada is a haven for copyright pirates is simply false. Not true. Not even remotely true. And while Michael Geist neatly makes the case against the lobbyists - notably the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which represents mostly U.S. interests in Canada (the Canadian music publishers and artists have long since left) - what I would like to question is how these false reports end up in our newspapers and (hence) influencing public policy. Almost every day, it seems, people hold up the traditional media as the paragon of reliability the web, the blogosphere and things like Wikipedia ought to be aspiring to. But even more frequently, I see examples of blatant and deliberate falsehood in the traditional media. True, there is no point shouting at them - they have no intent to listen. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MyNewport - MyLearning Essentials for Facebook
This is an interesting article showing how a university mashed its local information system with Facebook. "MyNewport is a Facebook application that allows students to access to MyLearning Essentials resources from Facebook." That said, it is worth noting, Facebook is a closed platform. Graham Attwell: "Yes the college VLE uses open standards. But Facebook does not. It is one thing providing access ot a developers kit to write applications to get data in to Facebook. But what about the other way round. How can learners get their data from Facebook into their Portfolio. As far as I can see they can't." Why do we keep having to learn the same lesson over and over. More...