By Stephen Downes
February 17, 2004
Networks...
A moment...
Give me (lever and) a place to stand, and I will move the world.
The network seeks its own balance.
Not a posteriori, not a priori; in the moment.
Quality, quantity, moment.
To perceive a moment, one must be outside space and
time. A forest perceived only by seeing more than the
trees, a wave perceived only by seeing more than the
droplets of water. The moment is created not by types of
entities, or numbers of entities, but combinations of
entities. Moments are emergent.
the circuits of communication are the
supports of an accumulation and a
centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the
anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of
the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our
social
order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated
in it, according to a whole technique of forces and
bodies.
The concept of the arbitrary nature of
the imaginary representation of the real conditions of existence...
Individuals grow, replicate, interact and create the
network; the network seeks balance; this interplay creates
patterns of perception, emergent phenomena, moments; and
these exert a non-causal influence on individuals as
we attempt to interpret that which we cannot
comprehend.
If we were to imagine the internet as a global mind, how
would we determine what it was thinking? Not by examining
any individual website, or even every website, but by
looking for the patterns, the standing waves, the moments.
And if we were to seek a single one of the internet's
thoughts, how would we look? We would not seek through
individual neurons, but would depend on the mind to
organize itself, and tell us.
The pixels on the screen have no causal power, but the
image on the screen can make you run and hide, or jump for
joy. We must learn to perceive, to use, the internet in
exactly the same way, as a self-organizing network.
By
Various Authors, February, 2004
[
Refer][
Research][
Reflect]
No Future?
Good diagram depicting
types of knowledge sharing (and non-sharing). My
organization, like most, I suppose, belongs in the fourth
group: the "knowledge fortress," where knowledge is hoarded
against external threats, and where sharing is encouraged
only though building cross functional teams - hence our
emphasis on inter-group collaboration, and also on
collaboration with selected companies and universities. But
my sense of knowledge sharing is more like the first
or second groups, where knowledge sharing occurs through a
(wide) network. Sharing knowledge with only select groups
to me runs counter to the idea of knowledge sharing at all.
In the end, what matters is, how can the knowledge best
serve my employers, the people of Canada? And my belief is
that it serves them best if it is shared with them. By
Unknown, mpsos, February 16, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their
Places
Via elearnspace. This article is a
concise and accurate introduction to the concept of the
'trackback' in blogging. As the author (who has obviously
done his homework) explains, "A TrackBack ping is blogspeak
for a short message sent from one Web server to another."
It lets one blog know that another blog is linking to it.
The key word here is "send" - pings must be sent and
received, which means that you must be using a specific
blogging tool for pings to work. Though the language for
pings is widely shared, through APIs (application program
interfaces), it means that to participate in the system you
have to do more than merely make your content available. I
have argued elsewhere against the use of trackbacks,
suggesting that the same result may be obtained through
content aggregation. Why am I opposed to pings? Well, it's
a form of push, which means I am in effect letting someone
else place content into my system automatically. And
history tells us that any push technology will be abused by
spammers and worse (it's just this sort of system design,
in a different context, of course, that makes Microsoft so
vulnerable to viruses). Moveable Type users especially have
already had to deal with API spam, and this trend will only
increase. So while the benefits described in this article
are real, the implementation by today's blogging software
is flawed. Anyhow. I am the only person in the world, it
seems, opposed to Trackback. So for now, it may be best to
go with the flow. But maybe have a back-up plan ready, just
in case. By Phillip D. Long, Syllabus, February 17, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Content Delivery in the
'Blogosphere'
Introductory article on
educational blogging (you can tell the writers are still
uneasy about it from the scare quotes around the well
established term 'blogosphere'). I wish the authors of
these articles would look a bit more deeply into the
subject; while Weblogg-ED is a good introduction, I don't
see how Blogsphere.us qualifies as one of the top two blogs
you'd list on the subject of educational blogging. And a
1991 reference about community building does not indicate a
genuine desire to credit people who have developed the
field in the online environment. By Richard E. Ferdig and
Kaye D. Trammell, T.H.E. Journal, February, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Publishers Unite to Tackle
Copyright
U.S. publishers have singled out
Ukraine and Pakistan as countries where 'piracy' occurs
(note that the actions are called 'piracy' even though they
may be legal the other jurisdictions) and recommend that
China be placed on a watch list. Via digital-copyright. By
Unknown, Authorlink, February 15, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Total Quality Management Strategic Plan for
Distance Course Development
It's enough to make
some academics shudder, of course, but this article
describes the development and application of an evaluation
rubric to distance learning courses. The think with
measuring quality is that you have to be sure you are
measuring for the right things. How, for example, does one
make sense of this: "Despite the poor student evaluations
for videoconference classes and the high dropout rate for
online classes, the demand for distance classes continued."
The application of TQM also raises questions about the
underlying motives, something this paper does little to
dispell: "In order for instructors to receive compensation
for distance courses, their courses would now have to be
evaluated against standards of best practice through a peer
review process." One wonders whether the University in
question applied its policy consistently, and charged
students tuition only after they had expressed satisfaction
with the course. Yeah, I thought not. By Donna G. Wood,
Melissa Roberts Becker, Rodney L. Osborne, Joyce A. Van
Nostrand, Sharon A. Winn, and Chuck Ziehr , DEOS News,
February 16, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Microsoft Killers
Nice essay
on the benefits and history of open source. The article
hits the usual targets, including OpenCola, Slashdot, and
Linux. It inlcudes a discussion of open source in
education, with references to OpenCourseWare and BioMed
Central. Goof introductory text. By Azeem Azhar, February,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
E-print Repository for Research Output at
QUT
Queensland University of Technology adopted
this policy effective at the beginning of the year, making
its entire "corpus of refereed research literature,
conference proceedings, and other non-refereed output"
available to the world. Via FOS News. By Various Authors,
Queensland University of Technology, January, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Constructivism and Hands-on
Exercises
Intelligent discussion of the
composition of statements of learning objectives in a
constructivist environment. "It seems to me," the author
writes, "that we always tend to define learning objectives
centered around tasks, even though the ability to
accomplish tasks is only part of the learning required in
order to be able to correctly choose and apply task-based
knowledge in practice; the type of learning that
constructivism promotes." Nice take from Bill Brandon, in which he suggests that the author "is
looking for a way to guide learners without directing or
telling them." And the author's response. By Holly
Henry-Pilkington, Holly's Research Journal, February 15,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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