Saturday, September 10, 2005

How Scalable is Your Online Course? - Online Classroom. Online course scalability—the degree to which an online course can be designed to accommodate larger or more sections of online courses without sacrificing quality—depends on how expert-dependent the course is, its delivery methods, and the amount of reso [Online Learning Update] 9:05:33 AM      Google It!.

An Experiment in A New Kind of Music. [Slashdot]  This provides an audio/musical demonstration of a theory where there is no "randomness" but rather a complex consequence of simple local intereaction "rules" that give rise to complex non-regular patterns.  The critial point in A New Kind of Science was that (for me) in our collective attempt to describe the "rules of the universe - regularity and orderliness" there was always the leftover "random error" that our rules could not resolve.  This encouraged the folk science of "randomness" as a necessary part of  every theroy that included real data measurement.  The Wolfram notion that there is simple and elegant alternative to "randomness" is further demonstrated in this musical extension of cellular automata to tonal automata.  In all of this there is an attempt to provide a theory that accomodates time and growth/change without "randomness" in the rules. -- BL 8:44:39 AM      Google It!.