John Naughton pointed me at this piece in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester on the great British economy disaster, which is long and thoughtful. Not to mention depressing and scary. He covers the political and economic repercussions...

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Exciting news: Google Apps script is now available for all Google spreadsheet users…, so it seems I was timely in starting to get to grips with playing with this stuff…;-) So what can we do with Google Apps Script? I’ve been posting a few ideas already, but here’s something I was working on last night – [...]

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Just a quick post to log another Google Apps script how to – this time how to grab a 2D array of CSV data from a URL and then paste it into a spreadsheet. For the trivial case, we could just as easily do this with an =importData() formula, but I’m still working out what [...]

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I was at a meeting yesterday looking at rebooting the OU’s Facebook strategy. With a bit of luck, this means that we’ll be doing another push on the OU Facebook apps that were developed several years ago now and which I still believe provide a sound basis for a range of community building and social [...]

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Der zweite Termin der heurigen Vorlesung “Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie” an der TU Graz besteht aus folgenden 2 Vorträgen:Mark Kramer: “The World as a Platform: Augmented Learning in the 21st Centrury” (Facebooklink) Günter Schreier: “Wer hat eHealth in der Tasche?” (Facebooklink)Beide Vorträge werden live gestreamt – Link zum Streamingserver Weitere Vorträge/Abstracts findet man hier auf der Vorlesungshomepage.Empfehle [...]

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My lecture slides for this year lecture on iPhone Application Development are now online available:iPhone – Human Interface Guidelines View more presentations from Martin Ebner.Empfehle diesen Artikel bei FacebookTwittere diesen Artikel!Empfehle diesen Artikel bei FriendFeedEmpfehle diesen Artikel bei del.icio.usEmpfehle diesen Artikel bei LinkedinBei StumbleUpon einstellenDigg this!Füge hinzu zu Mister WongSende dies zu MySpaceEmpfehle diesen Artikel bei [...]

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David Wiley points to the new US $500m OER initiative and notes they will be free for commercial reuse. "We now know that the resources created under the AGI funding will either be licensed CC BY or placed in the public domain. We know this because no CC licenses with SA or NC clauses live up to the promises made in the above statements. And the GFDL has been relegated to the realm of the OPL." Well, we'll see how this works out. The U.S. can provide content infrastructure (I agree with Wiley on this point, that content is infrastructure) free to citizens and corporations if it wants; we'll see how it reacts to what will be the natural impulse of the corporations to block access to the free stuff. David Wiley, iterating toward openness, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Books, Open Educational Resources] [Link] [Comment]

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The standard for online courses, we are told, is firmly in place. Mark Guzdial protests. "Surely, this can't be it - it can't be that Sakai + Twitter + a blog or Wiki is what all future studies will call the 'traditional' form of online courses? What about amazingly and powerful collaborative spaces like Kansas, and provably better ways of teaching with technology like cognitive tutors Surely we can do better than what's being used today? It's that second step that's more promising. We can do much better than that.  It's not even very hard.  Have you seen the great new tools that CMU has made available for building your own cognitive tutors I've learned that there is a term for those trying to change education through radical on-line approaches: 'edupunks.'" Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Portals, Twitter, Edupunk, Online Learning, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

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Is standardisation of curriculum 'an (un)stable and precarious achievement'? It is disquieting, writes Artichoke, "that after reading Edwards this seems increasingly likely." These reflections are based on a reading of Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Some good stuff here, like this: "innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine."

Artichoke considers this in turn with respect to Richard Edwards Translating the Prescribed into the Enacted Curriculum (paywall, sorry) which draws "from actor-network theory (ANT) [to] provide alternative readings of the translations of the prescribed into the enacted curriculum." What we see is essentially a critique of knowledge translation, which has become popular in some public policy circles. Artichoke quotes Latour, "To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation." 'Translating' (evidence-based) theory into practice is a one-way interaction, where what is really needed is diversity and conversation. Artichoke, Weblog, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Networks, Research, Interaction] [Link] [Comment]

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The meaning of a word, for Derrida, is in part defined by the alternatives it excludes. (See p. 89, here). What was the range of choices from which one could have selected? We see this explicitly in this model of Google Suggest. What questions can we ask, and what questions are excluded? What do you suggest represents this relationship visually, and interestingly, shows how by reforming language Google Suggest reforms what we can imagine. Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Google] [Link] [Comment]

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