Instant Outliner Information

"It looks like Dave is porting the instant outliner code in Radio UserLand to his new program called OPML. "

[Podcasting]

11:30:44 PM    

Why comments are disabled on this Weblog.

Last year my weblog began to be hit by comment spam, and Radio offers no simple way to block or delete these nuisances. With regret, I turned off comments.

I have opened a TypePad weblog (where I can do something about comment spam) and am in the process of shifting the Radio weblog(s) to "link blog" format. The TypePad weblogs will pick up the conversational format, including comments. I think the shift will be done by summer's end, or as soon after that as possible.

Thanks for understanding!

Bill Brandon

11:00:06 PM    

Collaboration Technologies.

The Future of Collaboration Technologies At CTC2005. Collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact, and key elements of successful implementations will have both presence - to allow communities of people to interact with "one click"- and persistence - which will enable a memory or continuity of...... [Online Collaboration :: Robin Good's Latest News]

1:05:38 PM    

Social Learning (see previous post also).

This relates to my previous post here. I don't have a problem with social learning, in fact I wish more designers used it as a model. But be careful, the learners still need to know how to evaluate, experiment, and apply what they learn.

Learn Together, Grade Individually. [T]he first Dave ... spoke briefly about how Web 2.0 is changing his kids' education and learning habits. Basically, they are practicing social knowledge acquisition, sharing answers and ideas over IM, yet getting graded primarily by how much they can regurgitate as individuals. We're ignoring the social side of what the Internet is doing. Kids, he said, know the way to be smart is to have smart friends, kind of that "know-where" learning idea of George Siemens that I've written about here before.

But here's what I'm struggling with, and to be honest, I'm not sure why it's sticking in my brain to the extent it is. There is, I'm feeling, some shift here that we're going to have to work through regarding our expectations of originality, some redefinition of plagiarism or what our expectations are. If knowledge gets constructed socially, if we and our students are learning by remixing (and yes, I listened to Lessig on the way up as well,) then I guess the question is do our teacherly ideas about original ideas have to be rethought?

The other interesting idea in the Open Source show was when Weinberger talked about how even our conception of a document has to change, how for hundreds of years we've thought of a report or a story as a container of information. But now, with hypertext, a document's value comes not so much from what it holds but from where it points out of itself to others. I think the reality is that we're going to have to start teaching students to give research back to us in a web-ified form, complete with links. In five years when we've moved beyond paper, hypertext writing (read "blogging") is going to be a basic literacy. The final mile will be to publish all of that writing in a public blog/portfolio space. Then we'll be cranking... [Weblogg-ed News]

11:26:46 AM    

Search Engines and learning.

In the last year, I have heard at least one well-known "expert" on e-Learning state (during a presentation to managers) that "Google is the most widely-used e-Learning application in the world." And I've heard similar sentiments from other experts, educators, and people who really ought to know better.  Statements of this sort are just irresponsible. Here's a study that makes my point.

A search engine brings the user information. That's all. It isn't learning, it's information. What people learn from or do with that information is up in the air, especially if they don't know how to evaluate the information. For a couple thousand years, educated people thought that a one pound weight fell more slowly than a ten-pound weight just because they read somewhere that it was so. Until Galileo trotted up the bell tower in Pisa and dropped a few weights, evidently nobody thought to check out what the Greek philosophers taught. Information retrieved from the internet by search engines is no more reliable than what is written in books or told on the street corner.

If your learners don't evaluate what they find on the Internet, if they can't even separate the product pitches and the press releases from the research results and the facts, don't be surprised if they "learn" some things that you hadn't intended, and expect that much of what they learn may be downright wrong. Learning requires inquiry, experiment, interaction, reflection -- please don't reduce the process to the inquiry step alone via search engine. It would be tragic if all we do with e-Learning is produce what I indelicately refer to as "high-tech dumbasses."

Study: Most Searchers Can't Tell Search Results from Ads, Use Search to Shop. More than half of internet users - 56 percent - do not know the difference between natural search engine results and paid search listings, and 51 percent of online U.S. adults use search for...

[summary] [MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing]

11:21:12 AM    

Design Case Study: East Carolina Chemistry Laboratory Preparation.

East Carolina Chemistry Laboratory Preparation - Dorothy Howse Clayton, Laurie Godwin, Chia Li, Joyce Joines Newman, Syllabus. The creation of an online Chemistry laboratory preparation Web site at East Carolina University was a collaborative project between faculty members in the Chemistry Department, the Harriot College of Arts and Sciences’ Instructional Technology Consultant, [Online Learning Update]

10:40:06 AM    

m-Learning: Is it learning, or is it just looking things up?

This is the second example I've seen in as many days about how being able to look things up on the Web is "just-in-time-just-for-me" learning. I have my doubts about this. Does this mean that using the telephone book is a form of learning? I keep wanting to go back to Gilbert's Performance Engineering Matrix to point out that, while many things affect human performance, they are not all the same, they are not all learning, and they do not all operate in the same way. I have the same criticism of the idea that some people are already spinning, that podcasting is a great way to deliver e-learning. Please. Podcasting is audio-only. It's a lecture over the Web. It's PowerPoint for the ears. It may be a useful way to get news, to trade ideas, to try to persuade, but it isn't interactive and I doubt whether -- by itself -- podcasting is a form of e-Learning any more than talk radio is.

The Open Cellphone: "The personal computer for the rest of the world isn't going to be the personal computer. It's going to be the cellphone...Communication is more important than computation on the human hierarchy of need."
Comment: Elearning designers and developers need to be aware of this trend. Most often, we're focused on the laptop/desktop computer as the device learners will use to access learning. Cellphones (and other mobile devices) are rapidly becoming the preferred tool for accessing online content. I recently asked a student what her main motivation was for using a cellphone for browsing online. She stated: "when I need to know something right away - movie listings and places to go". Just-in-time, just-for-me learning will come (actually is coming already) via a cellphone.

9:58:53 AM    

The Bodington System: Open Source VLE Issues

(An interesting post by Scott Leslie. I wasn't familiar with Bodington before this, but I'll find out more about it now. Following is an abbreviated quote from Scott's weblog.)

"Finally, a free lunch: The benefits of an open source VLE" - Report on Oxford's Use of Boddington.

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/vle/OpensourceVLE.doc

Worth a read, in part because of it's brevity, this report synopsizes Oxford University's experiences over the past 4 years in adopting the open source Bodington system.

[EdTechPost]

11:44:04 PM    

The argument over computer games and learning goes on ... and on ... and on ... .

Are Computer Games Rebooting Our Minds?: "...you have to sit on one side of the fence or the other...either games have no effect and we should rip them out of schools, or they have an effect and we really should think about it."

[elearnspace]

Good grief. Can people possibly learn as a result of playing a game? Of course. Can people learn as a result of playing any game? Of course not. If a game is designed to be an environment for learning, people can learn from it if it's a good design. If a game is designed to be an environment for entertainment, people will learn to play the game but not much else. If a game is designed to "teach" (i.e., to deliver canonical outcomes), nobody should expect far transfer from it.

Can we please move along now?

11:30:43 PM    

Moodle rises again.

Moodly Stuff. Since I am on the extreme margin of involvement of course management systems at Maricopa, I’ve not intensively followed the latest CMS stuff, but hear that Sakai is bubbling and there is even more spots of interest on the adoption of Moodle. Leon at Y.uk? emailed about 2 new Moodle articles on his blog, “Innovative Practitioners [...] [CogDogBlog]

6:27:24 PM    

If you are launching a new product you probably want to include on your Web site a movie about what it does. TechSmith's Camtasia is the one I hear most recommended and they are soon to release their third version, info on that here.

What's your favorite screen capture program?

That reminds me to check into the BlogCast Repository, which is where there's a bunch of screen-captured technical videos. What's your favorite technical video captured with a tool like Camtasia?

6:26:54 PM    

Design Thinking.

Fast Company: Strategy by Design. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy -- all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don't focus very much on making it better. [Tomalak's Realm]

6:26:28 PM    

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.

[How to Save the World]

More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I've been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example.

The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management.

[McGee's Musings]

11:07:55 PM    

From Desirable Roasted Coffee: Reboot: We Don't Have the Tools is OUT as an Excuse.:

QUOTE

What's key here is that drive and brains and a willingness to collaborate, not expensive tools and committees, created this site.

UNQUOTE

5:33:01 PM    

Sounds mighty fishy to me too!

From It gets worse: Corante > Flackster >.:

QUOTE

The CEO (Jesse Tayler) of a company (Netmodular) that develops blogging software (Blogworking) writes a less than entirely coherent pitch for his own product.

He posts this pitch on an independently-owned, semi-commercial blog site (AlwaysOn) that just happens to run on the software platform developed by his company.

Neither the author nor the site's owners make any effort to disclose the partisan nature of the pitch.

After I attack the covert and, in my opinion, clumsily argued pitch at my blog, a commenter (Marc Lefton) leaps to the original author (Jesse Tayler)'s defence.

Thirty seconds of research reveal that the selfless defender of Mr. Tayler's reputation is also directly connected to both Netmodular and to Jesse Tayler himself. A fairly important point Mr. Lefton neglects to mention.

This is exactly the kind of thing that allows detractors to call the integrity and editorial standards of bloggers into question. As Rick Bruner put it last year, in a short piece about Mazda's ill-advised faux blog:

"Marketers, please, please get the point: blogs are about building trust, not spinning it."

'Nuff said.

UNQUOTE

5:31:01 PM