By Stephen Downes
June 9, 2003
CADE 2003
Today's OLDaily is
coming to you from the 2003 Canadian Association for
Distance Education (CADE) conference in St. John's,
Newfoundland. If you are looking for my presentation - it's
not available yet, as the only internet available is via
the 'cybercafe' stocked with awkward Sun machines with
Netscape 4.7! and 'locked browsers' - no wireless (*sigh*)
- and, at the same time, my dial-up internet connection has
mysteriously ceased to function. The talks have been good,
and with any luck I hope to be able to get some of the
conference content (and photos) to you some time before I
return home on Wednesday. By Various Authors, CADE 2003,
June 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Is Big Brother the Future of British
Hovernment?
With this entry I go off topic a
little to try to flag some important trends. Saturday's
Globe and Mail noted that only 21 percent of Canadians
under 30 bother to vote in elections. Why might that be?
Well, it could be because there's no point. Representative
democracy simply doesn't respond to the needs of the
electorate. Rather, politicians tell us what we need. "When
Tony Blair recently appeared before a studio audience of
women who did not want war with Iraq, he sat there telling
them why it was necessary." So what would work better? Big
Brother - the show, not the overlord. " can't have been the
only viewer who was waiting for him to invite us to press
the red button on our digital handsets to let him know the
result. Big Brother has given us a taste for direct
democracy. The cat is out of the bag." Now I wouldn't say
that a television show is the answer to our society's
problems. But what I am saying is that this sort of
phenomenon shows that people not only want, they expect,
direct influence over the things that affect their lives.
Politicians ignore this at their peril, not because they
won't be re-elected (the same old crowd will keep voting
them in) but because they will become increasingly
irrelevant. By Unknown, The Telegraph, June 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
An Exploration of Adventure and Discovery
Projects
So how - one might ask after hearing my
presentation today - might we get beyond the stringing
together of learning objects to create lessons and courses?
This page offers a bit of a glimpse. This page lists and
links to various online adventures and projects that
students can link to and follow, adventures such as the
Odyssey United States Trek, the National Science
Foundation's Polar Connections, and the Teletext CAMELL
Expedition, which attempted the first ever circumnavigation
of Australia by camel. This article also links to some meta
pages including tips and strategies along with some usefil
listings and registries. By Graeme Daniel and Kevin Cox,
Web Tools Newsletter, June 7, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Metadata is Essential Web Writing
Skill
This is Part One, the better (but still
questionable) content is in Part Two. The gist of the series is that
everyone should place metadata into their web pages, and to
(in part two) offer guidelines to the creation of such
metadata. I really question this. First, because of
metadata spam, search engines don't use web page metadata
any more (or, at least, not to any greate degree). Second,
the person who should create metadata about a web page
isn't the author (beyond such basics as naming the title
and the author), but rather, the reader. This is, of
course, the role that blogs serve: and the really useful
information about this page consists in comments (like this
one), and not the author's own appraisal, right? By Gerry
McGovern, New Thinking, June 2, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Music Biz In a Pearl
Jam
People will look back and say that this is
the moment it ended. Pearl Jam, one of the major recording
acts in the world today, has abandoned its label in order
to go it alone on the internet. This is the end, my friend,
this is the end. "So what is at stake? Everything. If the
marquee band can leave the most important label in
recording history with impunity, then the major label lock
on the music business is over." By Eric Olsen, MSNBC, June
5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Students Shirk Cursive as Keyboard Rules In
Third Grade
In a nutshell, "Such attitudes are
worrying to a growing number of parents, educators and
historians, who fear that computers are speeding the demise
of a uniquely American form of expression. Handwriting
experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail, instant
messages and other electronic communication, particularly
among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades."
First (and with a big roll of the eyes), I don't know about
people in Britain or Australia, but I learned cursive and I
am most definitely not American - when authors say
something is 'uniquely American' (and this happens a lot)
they should actually look outside the United States to
verify whether this is so. Second, so we lose cursive. No
loss. I stopped using it somewhere in early high school,
opting to print any written work I did. By Associated
Press, CNN, June 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Laptops In Schools Click, Win
Support
As the school year ends, praise for
Main's laptop program is almost universal. "I'm optimistic.
You can't hold this back. Parents have told me, 'You better
not touch that laptop fund,' " he said. "It's almost like
the students and families are going to be demanding that it
be continued and expanded." More. By Associated Press, Portland Press
Herald, June 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Hired!
As a final note for today,
we at NRC welcome Sebastian Paquette - of Seb's Open Mind
fame - to our research group in Moncton. Welcome, Seb. By
Seb Paquette, Seb's Open Research, June 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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