OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
July 29, 2005

Update from Bangkok
Hm. Interesting. "I’ve come to realize that mobile media is a joke. Carrier data fees are out to lunch, J2ME is a development nightmare and every manufacturer adheres to a slightly different official standard." Or this: "There is no mobile platform even in Asia." Via eLearning Entrepreneur. By Bryan Rieger, The Life of Bryan, July 25, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

How You Should Use Blogs in Education
James Farmer offers a list of ways you should use blogs in learning, but runs up against the conundrum educators all over have encountered, between "you must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course" and "one of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency." These two pull against each other. By James Farmer, Blogsavvy, July 29, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

University of Phoenix Expands into Religious Teaching
This is the first real sign of what is probably a trend. "Apollo Group (parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix) has contracted with Lutheran High School of Orange County (LHSOC) to manage its online delivery of high school curriculum." By Dave Taylor, The Intuitive Life Business Blog, July 29, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Next Generational Educational Software: Why We Need It and a Research Agenda to Get It
The author outlines a need for tools that "allow exploration at multiple levels of detail and accomodate diverse learning styles." Sounds good, though readers may recognize the proposed 'clip models' as being very similar to learning objects. This paper is one of a series from the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. One wonders what the basis for this collection was; the assertion in Multimedia Scholarship for the 21st Century that "one must understand how strategically chosen and juxtaposed combinations of media enable the construction and dissemination of meaning..." would certainly seem to apply to this collection. By Andries van Dam, EDUCAUSE, July 29, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

European Training Village
The European Training Village has upgraded its portal. "News items, announcements, press releases, forthcoming events and information on important documents are available from the re-structured ETV News database." The site looks nice; I like the colour scheme, though find the text a little small. Forcing people to register in order to view the news and articles, though, is a big mistake. RSS feeds coming soon. Who cares? News you can't read is no news at all. By Various Authors, July, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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