By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Thinking Like an Engineer
"Can games actually develop creative thinking and foster innovation?" asks Gina Svarovsky. "Yes. The data is in and this one does." She describes research work involving the game Digital Zoo and adds, "it turns out that, yes, by playing as engineers they learn to think about problems the way engineers do". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jerry Springer U.
This is pretty wild. A male student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill decides to break up with his girlfriend and invites her to 'The Pit', a meeting place on campus, for a "Valentine's day Surprise". Nothing unusual in that, but this guy advertised it on Facebook, and as many as 1,000 people showed up to record the breakup on video and hurl abuse at her. This article is a good account of the event and the phenomenon of online-initiated abuse in general, good because it doesn't automatically blame the internet but rather prompts us to ask what would make people think such behaviour is acceptable in the first place. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Debating the "Brain Glitch" Theory
The interminable phonics debate (how did this get so politicized?) continues in ASCD's Educational leadership and carries over into this item in the ASCD Blog. The debate begins with neurologist Judy Willis criticizing claims that "neuroscience proves the necessity of intensive phonics instruction for students who struggle with reading." In particular, she points to the limits of neuroimaging technologies. And she questions whether the children being studied were actually rerading of whether they were merely reciting. The response suggests that Willis ognores decades of research showing that "to read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech." I'm more inclined to the view that learning to read is complex, including both elements of phonics and language structure or syntax. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Inter Partes Determination Published
The nice clear version: "The USPTO found 13 of Desire2Learn's 14 claims to raise substantial new questions of patentability." (Aside: it is interesting to note that the use of a tag, in this case 'edupatents', imposes a requirement on the part of the writer - hence Feldstein's note in this post. This is why I use regular expressions rather than tags - a regular expression captures the words that would notmally be used in a post, rather than requiring that the author use a word that doesn't even exist. The Blackboard patent page uses a regular expression, which is why I don't even need to think about it). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Educational Resources Taking Off
Useful post on issues related to open educational resources (OERs) that also points the reader to the Open Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project that "aims at building an online information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of OER, in particular, open digital educational content (ODEC) in Europe". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MED Online for Free
This is the sort of thing that makes the internet great (and which really rekindles my belief in free and open online resources). The entire Old English dictionary (with all the references, etc) has been made available for free online by the University of Michigan. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life&Voice - It Will Happen!
They can't handle more than 38,000 people at a time, forcing them to kick 'non-paying' customers off the service at peak loads, but they're going to have voice chat integrated by June, 2007? You know, what this reminds me of is AOL's original strategy - advertising like crazy, offering a service that they couldn't sustain, then turning around and using the hype money to buy a real business, which in their case turned out to be Time-Warner. More...
La 25ème enquête insertion professionnelle de la CGE dresse un panorama très positif de l’entrée sur le marché du travail des jeunes diplômés. Plus...
Woz U propose une formation en ligne pour apprendre la programmation informatique. Le cofondateur d’Apple prévoit l’ouverture de 30 campus aux États-Unis et dans le monde. Plus...
Les écoles françaises placent trois écoles parmi les trente meilleures mondiales en termes d’attractivité pour les employeurs. L’école Polytechnique fait un spectaculaire bond en avant. Plus...
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