OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
September 29, 2004

The Future of Online Learning and Knowledge Networks
Slides from my presentation at education.au in Adelaide today (yesterday?). I outline the 'consensus view' (or perhaps, the 'orthodox view') of learning objects, repositories and federated search, outline why I think this view misreads the marketplace, technology, business models and convergence on the internet, and outline my own distributed search and management proposal. I have something like five hours of audio from yesterday; it too will be available in the future. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, September 29, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Learning Object Production and Implementation: UT Telecampus
The article appears to have an editing malfunction near the beginning, but stick with it as the people interviewed - Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of the University of Texas - offer some good insites on the practicalities of implementing learning objects learned during the course of a large scale course development project using learning objects. Note especially the discussion following the observation that standard e-learning can be boring - "However, if you concede that LOs include a message component, we can enable LOs to "talk" with other objects: tests can be posted to grade books; RSS feeds can be pulled into pages and pushed into blogs; student interactions can be tracked and guided; teams can explore and learn and solve complex problems together in an immersive, communication-rich online community. In what seems at times a silent digital wilderness, voices can be heard." You can visit their site and have a look - follow the instructions at the bottom of the article. By Susan Smith Nash, E-Learning Queen, September 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Friction Between Modes of Production
Discussion and link to an essay on the creation of Wikipedia by Taran Rampersad. "What has changed is the level of cooperation around the world; the amount of content that has been created is amazing - the capacity of future content is staggering. The truth is that the Wikipedia has just started; nobody has said it is finished..." By Ross Mayfield, Many 2 Many, September 29, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

EFF p2p Copyright Guide
Interesting reading foreveryone and enormously useful for those working with peer-to-peer (P2P) software, this guide reviews relevant case law and offers ten valuable suggestions to avoid litigation. By Fred von Lohmann, P2P Net, September 28, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Designing Blogs for Education
It's written entirely in point form and readers must unfortunately deduce the links to look at the examples, but this presentation on the educational use of blogs is a fascinating exploration. See especially the sections on 'what is an education blog', 'issues', and 'features of my education blog'. Though I am not convinced of the suggestion - implicit in this article - that boogs must be specially 'designed' for education. By Jonathan Briggs, JonathanBriggs.com, September 29, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

How Technology Will Destroy Schools
David Wiley reflects. "As the price for these human-network interfaces decreases (which it certainly will), as network access becomes increasingly ubiquitous (which it will), and as the ratio of retrieval from the network to retrieval from human memory approaches one (which it will), it makes less and less sense for our children to spend their early years sitting in classrooms trying to develop the ability to retrieve inert information from memory faster than they can retreive the same information from the network." Don't miss the comment posted in reply. By David Wiley, David Wiley's Stuff, September 24, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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