OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
June 28, 2005

Community Plumbing in Action: The Story of BEAT and the Campus Commons
This is a very good paper outlining the development of BEAT (the Business, Education, and Applied Technology program, which is an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional program that takes an applied, integrated approach to IT training) and the Campus Commons at UPEI. There's a lot going on in this paper, so read closely, but the core for me is the conceptual view of a self-organizing academic community and the key lessons: adopt an open strategy, encourage and allow freedom, attract a diversity of members, allow emergent communities to grow, and take an applied and integrated approach. Don't miss this paper. Via Graham Attwell. By Mark Hemphill, Open Culture conference, June 28, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Is It a Wiki? A Floor Wax? A Dessert Topping?
After you read Brian Lamb's article, take the time to visit Tiddly Wiki for a bit. As you look more closely, it will become more and more amazing - an entire wiki can be a single file. Lamb writes, "The entire tool is contained in one html file using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Which makes the wiki very portable, and can be run in any modern browser. As suggested on the website, I also installed it and PortableFirefox on my USB thumb drive. This would make updating/showing the e-portfolio very portable as well. However, to save the changes of the wiki page, it requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, plus save capabilities (write access) to a server." By Brian Lamb, Abject Learning, June 28, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Infrastructure of Sharing in the Commons
Everyone is talking about things like blogs, Flickr, Wikipedia and the like, notes the author. "What makes all of this possible is the emergence of an infrastructure for sharing in the commons." What this boils down to is a combination of several key elements: the emergence of open source, open standards, and especially XML, "online tribes" (such as hackers) that take sharing as a core virtue, political movements that advocate the same, peer-to-peer distribution of resources, and business models that make them feasible. "The web is self-organizing and forming clusters of functionality which exceed the boundaries of a single web portal." By Teemu Arina, FLOSSE Posse, June 28, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Google Earth – Explore, Search and Discover
Google scores again with Google Earth - now free - which is essentially a three-dimensional representation of the entire Earth. "Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips." Toss your old paper-based atlas into the dustbin. What Google Earth demonstrates more than anything else is the difference between paper-based and digital content. It is to this difference we should be aspiring in online learning. More. >More. Via Slashdot. By Various Authors, Google, June 28, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Blogs in the Classroom
Corrected link from yesterday. By Kathy Gill, Gnomedex, June 24, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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