By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educamp Colombia
Greetings from Medellin, Colombia, where I am getting ready for the second of two 'educamps' we are having here. The workshops - yesterday's involved a hundred or so teachers from the Bogota region, and tomorrow's in Medellin will be similar - are being conducted in the 'camp' format: Diego Leal introduces the format and I talk about the concepts of e-learning 2.0 and connectivism, and then we spend the rest of the day in various user-directed activities. In Bogota, the first set was devoted to the web 2.0 tools, and the second on challenges and issues over using web 2.0 in learning. I got to talk with dozens of educators, to listen and learn a lot, to play in an OLPC, and much more.
There's a lot of content you can look at already. Yesterday's educamp was broadcast live using UStream (check Friday for the Medellin educamp on the same channel). Diego describes the event (in Spanish) in his blog. He has posted his own slides on Slideshare. You can also view my slides on Slideshare. Diego Leal, Colombia Apprendre December 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Connectivism, Online Learning, E-Learning 2.0, Web Logs]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canadians Ace Science Test
The release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) science test results was front page news in El Tiempo here in Colombia today. The tests, organized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) measure fifteen-year-olds against a set of educational standards determined by the testing agency. The 2006 test was written by 400,000 15-year-olds in 57 countries. The PISA tests are not a measure of a country's educational system (the questions are not aligned to curricular objectives) and have been criticized in the past for irregular process (participants are chosen by subject countries). More...