By Stephen Downes
May 13, 2003
What Makes a Publisher Important?
I like the direction this article heads, but
I'm not so sure
publishers will, if they follow its implications to their
logical
conclusion. The article proposes, in brief, that an article
may be
measured for importance by "the relative number of
citations of a search engine as the evaluation criteria."
By
implication, a journal that accumulates a greater aggregate
score is probably better than one with fewer links. Of
course,
this method ignores those journals locked away in
proprietary
databases (but they'r enever found, or read, anyway, so it
may
not matter). More to the point, the system is democratic to
a
fault: one person's link to a publication is given as much
weight
as the next's. This makes the most important publication of
our
time the "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" parody site, or
some
such thing. But hey. Maybe it was the most important
publication.
Now for the logical implication: it is likely that some
publications
will score less well than some personal websites. If I test
Google
with link:www.downes.ca I get 654 hits. Try the same test
for the
Journal of Distance Education -
link:http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JDE/ - and I get 100 hits.
So -
where should I publish my next paper? The answer is obvious
-
on my own website, where it is six times more likely to be
read.
Yeah! But this makes a bit of a mash of the idea of
'superior
publications' - doesn't it? By Avi Rushinek and Sara
Rushinek, Ubiquity, May 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
No One Standard Will Suit All
It
began as a lonely voice in the wilderness but has grown
into
open revolt as delegate after delegate at the E-Learning
Results
conference comes forward with the same message: "there is
no
one standard to rule them all, nor will there ever be.
However
seductive the vision of universal interoperability may be,
each
and every community has its own needs and wants that need
to
be addressed." IMS, it would appear, now hears this. "IMS
aims
to gather international specification requirements, come up
with
flexible specs, which can be adapted or 'profiled' to meet
local
needs." What, then, of SCORM? "Blindly using SCORM is
hardly
the answer either- unless your community's needs can be
satisfied by it. In this, Lisa Balzereit from the ADL
co-lab,
admitted, SCORM had clearly been oversold. One of the
lessons
ADL learned about the SCORM is to better manage
expectations. Which was well exemplified by Dan Rehak,
SCORM's chief architect, who pointed out the many times
he'd
been told that 'we want to adopt SCORM', which is countered
by
Dan's standard 'what do you want to do with it?'- and often
they
have no idea." By Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, May 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
NationStates
Not sure how it will
go but I really like the concept, so I created
the nation of Merlandia in the game of NationStates, a
straight-forward world politics simulation. One thing I
like about
this is the pacing: you are presented with one issue a day.
The
game could be more sophisticated, but it's a wonderful
idea, the
sort of thing that would be great to to start the class on
in
September and have them play throughout the year.
NationStates isn't quite ready for that level, though. Also
interesting is the economic model behind this site: no fees
or
subscriptions, but the site is associated with a book, and
the
book is regularly advertised. By Max Barry, Jennifer
Government, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
TidBITS Policy on Challenge-Response
If you're thinking of using a
challenge-response (C-R) system to
block spam, think again. The idea of C-R is that if an
email
comes from an unrecognized source, the email is blocked
until
the sender, in response to an email (the 'challenge') goes
to a
website and answers a question only humans can answer (the
'response'). This article identifies a number of C-R
pitfalls. It
leaves out the worst one, though: some C-R systems collect
the
senders' email addresses that pass the challenge, and send
them spam. Anyhow. OLDaily Policy on
Challenge-Response: OLDaily has already been hit by
some
C-R systems. I have sent the response, and gotten spam for
my
troubles. And like the authors of this article, I have too
many
subscribers to do this manually. And so, like most
newsletter
distributors, I will simply delete C-R requests. Yes, spam
is a
pain. But breaking my nice subscription system isn't the
way to
fix it. By Adam C. Engst, TidBITS, May 12, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Google Branches Out Again with Overseas News
Going in exactly the right direction: Google
News expands with
Canadian,
Australian
and British
news
services (I won't comment on what perspective it could be
that
makes Canada 'overseas' from the writer's perspective)...
By Keith Regan, E-Commerce Times, May 11, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Web's Impact On Student Learning
The author might be the first to agree that
this survey of
research in web-based learning is a bit misleading, since,
as she
notes, there has been little effort made to distinguish
between
the impact of the new technology and the impact of the
learning
design delivered, or employed, using that technology. No
matter.
What emerges in this comprehensive study isn't necessarily
surprising - individual differences matter when assessing
web-based learning, the web can be used to teach critical
thinking, the web promotes interaction - but it is useful
to see a
base of support for these common assumptions. Some
surprising
results: first, the brains of children that gre up in the
computer
age may be wired differently than those of their older,
more
text-driven, counterparts. And second, we may have an
innate
disposition to view any media - including computers - as
though
it were alive, having feelings and capable of emotional
responses. Which, of course, would make the blue screen of
death doubly troubling. By Katrina A. Meyer, T.H.E.
Journal, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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