Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’arcy Norman are doing one of the last presentations at the conference, so make sure you hang around!
(This is not my normal type of post, but I just enabled trackback for Radio and wanted to test it out, and know that Brian supports trackback).
– via [Object Learning]
“RSSJobs allows you to create and save searches for Monster, Dice, HotJobs,and more in one location, then delivers the results to your favorite RSS Reader.“
This is not really an ed tech related piece, but since I ranted about this back in June I felt I had to post it. As has been noted elsewhere, one of the amazing aspects of the ever-evolving net is the diminishing rant-to-actual-deployment ratio! – SWL
Well ain’t this oh-so self-reflective; you can read this post about this site in the site itself 😉
I’m not sure the extent to which I’ll actually be able to post from the conference for a few reasons. It’s at an odd time for me – August 6th is officially my last day with C2T2 so I am only able to attend the conference on the 7th. And I’ve yet to get wifi on my antiquated laptop. But, as a perk to myslef as I strike out on the road of being an independent consultant, I bought a Palm M130, and I’m investigating some of the myriad ways of interacting with my blog through a handheld, so if I can get my act together by then perhaps I’ll post something from there. – SWL
“A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.
And then a description of what’s needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.”
I agree with Sebastien Paquet, this post is well worth reading. Pollard’s diagram captures what I think a lot of the previous efforts to define ‘what is a blog’ miss out; we should be focusing on the entire activity ‘blogging,’ with its many surrounding phenomenom, and not just the end product, a ‘blog’.
But where I think I depart from Pollard is that I’m actually pretty happy with the ‘conversations’ that the blogosphere is currently enabling. Actually, to be fair, I think a lot of the developments he’s talking about (e.g. taking blog-spawned discussions into a proper threaded space) make some sense. But I don’t necessarily agree that the effect of meeting fellow bloggers in a different medium shouldn’t be ‘jarring’ – I believe the medium has its own effect on our communications and *how* we communicate, and in the case of blog-based ‘communication’ I think some of these effects are very desireable. Blogs allow *my* words to show up in *your* space (your aggregator) without any confusion that they are *your* words. And unlike email, I can choose who I am listening to (you can of course choose not to open emails, but less and less it seems can you choose whom you receive them from). There’s more, there’s always more, but home I must go…
– via [Seb’s Open Research]
Via the TLTR mailing list came notice of this excerpt regarding the “Psychological Sense of Community” – an attempt to identify the psychological factors that determine whether an individual will feel they are a part of a community. The four major factors he identifies are Membership, Influence, Integration, and the Fulfillment of Needs. This struck me as relevant to recent musings by Charlie Lowe over at Kairosnews on why communities don’t form out of online classes even though the conditions seem otherwise ripe. – SWL
In this paper, Robert Tinker (President of The Concord Consortium, itself worth a detailed look) describes the evolution of educational technology with an analogy to how steam first augmented, then replaced, wind-powered sails.
He details some of the future’s driving forces (Moore’s Law, open source) and some of the general classes of applications on the horizon (literacy tools, design tools and tools to work with concepts). One comment struck me as odd – “Why is there so little open source software for education?” I guess from where I’m sitting there doesn;t appear to be such a dearth. But then reading on it becomes clearer why one might think this – it is perhaps more the case that there is a lack of widely adopted *good* software, software that is usuable by non-technical users. – SWL
– via [Distance-Educator] and [elearnspace blog]
go back and read/use
instructions on how to install beta for trackback for radio
I’ll admit to not having paid a lot of attention to the ‘Friend of a Friend’ format to date, but a couple of things I’ve read recently made me pay a little more attention to this XML-based personal profile that can help connect you to others through the people you know.
Today I stumbled on this – a simple yet useful javascript-based form that helps create an initial FOAF RDF file to get you started. Very handy! In theory, and in practice, XML was meant to be ‘human readable’ and fairly straightforward to create. But little applications like this are so helpful – once you’ve structured data you already understand, expanding it by hand becomes much more straightforward. – SWL
– via [Channel ‘social_software’] and [WebDawn]