Stephen Downes

LRMI stands for 'Learning Record Metadata Initiative' and is a (yet another) mechanism for describing learning resources. See more here. This post describes the LRMI Alignment Object, which is intended to describe how a given resource fits into curricular or educational standards requirements, such as the US Common Core State Standards or the English National Curriculum (the article has a good set of links to similar standards). A number of alignment object syustems have come on stream recently (since everyone thinks it's the 'holy grail' of resource metadata) including Kritikos and OER Commons (both of which are described in the article).

OK, this is ambitious. "My ultimate scientific breakthrough dream would be the Qualified Self in the analogy of the Quantified Self." Given a provisional nod, what would such a qualified self look like? "All the gathered data would gather data on: emotions, creativity, understanding, progress, personal character." Well, I did a test like that recently (the Hermann Brain Dominance instrumnent) and while it was nice to test off the scale for creatity, the point here is that there was a scale. Is there a way to qualify self without it descending into qualtification? We are so permeated with metrics, we cannot fathom - well, what would we even call them - matrics? (p.s. what made me look at this item was the image - I was intrigued by the way some people are following the program (which looks like, "act like you're walking") while others aren't really making an effort. Such things interest me - what motivates a person to participate fully in something like that, and why would others be reticent?)

I like this video a lot. It gets at an important element of the scientific method (not the only element - the scientific menthod is much more complicated than one simple rule) and it also gets at why so many people reason poorly. In a nutshell: when we look for evidence, we very often look for evidence that confirms out theories, and that's often pretty easy to find. But the confirmation is an illusion. It's only when we try to find evidence that disproves our theories that we can know whether we're getting closer to the truth. Via ScienceDump.

It's interestging to see how in recent years the concept of 'innovation' is being rewoeked such that, if it doesn't involve some commercial component, it isn't innovation. But this post from D'Arcy Norman offers an alternative perspective. "Many in the edtech field see innovation as something like 'working out creative licensing deals with vendors and/or publishers,'" he writes. "No. It isn’t. Edtech is important because it can be transformative." He continues, "It can literally change the nature of the learning experience. It can shift people from consume mode, into collaborate and publish mode. It can knock down walls. Evaporate silos. Connect people across campus, across campuses, and across the globe." The whole commercialization thing puts the cart before the horse. It's not things that have commercial potential that are importnat. It's things that are important that have commercial potential. Commercialization is (or may be) the result of innovation, not the driver.

Video interview with Gilly Salmon. Now, the first MOOC that she is leading is about to launch. "Carpe Diem—Learning Design starts on March 10, and we took the opportunity to discuss some of the differences between course design for traditional online learning and for MOOCs. We also dig a little bit into the resources that were required to build this MOOC."

I don't agree with everything Daniel Dennett says, but what he says is never trivial (in the way, say, Jerry Fodor or David K. Lewis are trivial) - the postulates he offer require serious thought, because they are genuine possibilities, and not just semantical tricks. "If I ask you," he says, "'What is it like to be a termite colony?' most people would say, 'It's not like anything.' Well, now let's look at a brain, let's look at a human brain—100 billion neurons, roughly speaking, and each one of them is dumber than a termite and they're all sort of semi-independent." So what's the difference? Human brains, he says, co-evolved with culture, and termite colonies did not. "In bringing up a child in a social world, what you're basically doing is installing thousands of apps and meta apps, and apps on top of apps on the hardware of the brain."

The proof is in the reading: it does work. "With compact text streaming from Spritz, content can be streamed one word at a time, without forcing your eyes to spend time moving around the page. Spritz makes streaming your content easy and more comfortable, especially on small displays."

This post is worth a link even if only for its link in turn to the Richard Feynman Lectures, freely published on the internet for everyone to read. Well - not so freely. If you want to convert the text to ePub in order to read it on a Kindle, the copyright owners will get very very angy at you. Still, it can be done in only 136 lines of ruby code (see the script on Github).