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Entries for December 2010
Administrator Account on December 31, 2010 07:00 
Numerous open courses are kicking off in 2011. I’m involved in two: Learning and Knowledge Analytics (LAK11) and the third iteration of Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK11 – with Stephen Downes). I’ve posted the draft syllabus of LAK11 here. Since we make everything else in these courses open, it makes sense that we share our [...] 
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Administrator Account on December 31, 2010 02:52
Frederick Hess,
EducationNext, December 30, 2010.
Leaving aside how unhelpful league table rankings of scholars and pundits are in the first place, this Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings is even more worthless than most. Yes, I said worthless. First of all, the 'rankings' are only of a set of already pre-selected subjects. The selection process occurs in some back room, then the people are ranked. As a result, they're all American, all have American university affiliation, and all of the politician-pundit variety. Second, the criteria used to measure rank - Google Scholar, book sales, newspaper mentions, Congressional record mentions - are strictly old school. Not to mention biased toward politician-types who foster more heat than light.
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Administrator Account on December 31, 2010 02:52
D'Arcy Norma,
D'Arcy Norman dot net, December 30, 2010.
"If people are to manage their own content, forming their digital identities," writes D'Arcy Norman, "they need a way to host software and content that doesn't require obscure and detailed technical knowledge." This is exactly right, and the solution he offers (or, more accurately, works his way around) is exactly right as well: people should be able to host their own web servers as easily as they run their own web browsers. Opera Unite is a good, early, example. Of course, "all of this is based on the (likely false) assumption that people really give a crap about running their own stuff and owning their software and data rather than continuing to feed their activity streams into 'free' hosted services." But they will. Mark my words, they will.
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Administrator Account on December 31, 2010 02:52 
http://howardrheingoldsteachingnotes.posterous.com/rheingold-u-introduction-to-mind-amplifiers,
Howard Rheingold's Teaching Notes, December 30, 2010.
So I'm thinking about Howard Rheingold's 'Mind Amplifiers' course (the idea that the net 'amplifies' is the new vogue right now; c.f. 'event amplification'), a little bit about whether I want to take it, but more about whether I could charge $100 a head and get 30 people to sign up for five weeks. Because, you know, that would be a good back-up plan for the day the government cuts the NRC from its budget. Though it would change the demographics of the course in a bad way. I was also wondering about the Social Media Classroom, which is just a Drupal mod, and I think gRSShopper is more purpose-built (and I promise I will release new (better, more likely to work for you) gRSShopper code the first week of 2011). But the main thing that I can't get out of my head is, I really like Rheingold and all, but why is he charging money? He's a university professor, he's already pulling it in.
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 06:54 
Unattributed,
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 28, 2010.
Denis Dutton, the founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily, has died. See also this notice in the L.A. Times. I once met Dutton on my first and only trip to New York, in 2000. I had been invited by Jeffrey Kittay, then the publisher of University Business to discuss the future of online learning and learning technology with him. He had just published my paper Nine Rules for Good Technology. Founded in 1998, A&L Daily was acquired by University Business in November 1999. When University Business folded in 2002, the website was taken over by the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was a regular reader of A&L Daily, and had designed NewsTrolls in a similar format. And for my new email newsletter, which I began sending in 2001, I borrowed from Dutton the 'Daily' of OLDaily. A tip of the OLDaily cap, then, a salute and a "hail! well met!" to Denis Dutton, a pioneer in our field.
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 04:46
Because absolutely no-one requested it, here is my annual running-review-with-tenuous-link-to-learning post. The year started badly as I'd had a month lay-off with hip bursitis. I lost some of my running mojo this year, and for long periods struggled to get... 
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 04:46
There are some great ideas for digital storytelling activities over on the DS106 blog (I love Tom Woodward's suggestions for restrictions eg telling stories using only photos from a specific category). They are very video and image - centric though... 
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 04:46
by LeeLeFever After the wikileaks controversy which highlighted the dangers of placing political discourse in the cloud, we have had the news of Delicious apparently being abandoned by Yahoo. Not a good week for cloud computing. As John Naughton puts... 
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 03:12
Brian Heater,
Gearlog, December 28, 2010.
Robots replacing teachers? Not exactly. But if you can't bring the teacher to the classroom, the robot might help. "The robots stand around 3.3 feet high. The aforementioned human face--that of a Caucasian woman--is located on a small TV panel. The robots are controlled by be English teachers in the Philippines who are monitoring the kids' reactions remotely. The teachers' expressions, meanwhile, are detected by cameras and displayed on the robot teacher's face." More here, here and here.
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Administrator Account on December 29, 2010 01:09
A week or so ago, I posted a quick hack using the Google Social graph API showing how to generate a list Common Friends or Followers on Twitter, so that you could look up which folk would see, in their Twitter timeline, a conversation between two other people on Twitter. (A hosted version of the [...]  
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