Edu_RSS
ESL demand up in North Korea
The Marmot posts about N. Koreans going goo-goo over English and links to an article in the L.A. Times. An expatriate living in Pyongyang who is involved with the nation's English-language programs said English had replaced Russian as the largest department at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, the leading foreign-language institute. "There is a big drive now for learning and speaking English. The Ministry of Education is really trying to promote it," said the expatriate, who asked not to be quoted by name because of the North Korean regime's sensitivity about news covera From
Language, teaching, and all things EFL on July 22, 2005 at 9:46 p.m..
Information Technology position at U of S
This is a term position to provide ID support to the Department of Computer Science. PRIMARY PURPOSE: To provide instructional and administrative support for undergraduate Computer Science programs by conceiving, developing and deploying novel learning environments for the Department's programs, and to provide successful, effective learning experience for students enrolled in Computer Science first year [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Instructional Design Position - U of S
INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER (1-year renewable term position) Extension Division, University of Saskatchewan The Extension Division at the University of Saskatchewan invites applications from qualified individuals for 2 limited term positions as Instructional Designer for one-year renewable terms commencing October 15, 2005. The successful applicants will work with a team of experts to design course materials for distributed learning. Currently, [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
IRRODL new issue
There is a new issue of IRODL out (available at www.irrodl.org) You can join to receive an email when new issues are published by subscribing at this site. Volume 6, no. 2 is full of good stuff. Here’s the table of contents. An Assessment of the Academic Achievement of Students in Two Modes of Part-time Programme [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Preview of coming attraction - want to participate?
Mike Winter, from Computer Science, sent a request for participation in a conference/gathering of minds he is helping organize. He’d like to see participation from our Educational Technology folks who would like to present their research or research ideas. This is a good opportunity and should be an interesting and comfortable setting to [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
EdTech Posse finally returns
The EdTech Posse Podcast #3 is finally available. Actually there is another one waiting in the wings (and for editing). In this podcast, Wall, Shareski, Couros and Schwier talk about Laura Turner’s list of “Twenty Essential Skills Every Educator Should Have”, as published on the THE Journal website. Hope you like it. [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Innovate - Live webcast - July 2005
Innovate-Live webcasts offer an opportunity to synchronously interact with the authors of the articles in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info ). These webcasts are produced as a public service by our partner, ULiveandLearn. If you wish to participate, please register at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/innovate/ The July webcast features Marc Prensky, who wrote “What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone? Almost [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
HICE 2006 Call for Papers
Call for Papers/Abstracts/Submissions 4th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Education January 6 - 9, 2006 Renaissance Ilikai Waikiki Hotel, Honolulu Hawaii, USA Submission Deadline: August 18, 2005 Sponsored by: East West Council for Education Asia-Pacific Research Institute of Peking University University of Louisville - Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods Web address: http://www.hiceducation.org Email address: education@hiceducation.org The 4th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Education will be [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
New location, same café
You may have noticed that the café looks a wee bit different. Rob Wall has moved us over to WordPress from Moveable Type, and it looks like this is a great new system to administer the account. Thanks Rob! As a result of the move, I’ve not added anything for a couple of [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Course Registration Numbers (CRN) for fall classes
Here are the CRNs for our ECMM classes in the fall. You will need an NSID and password for the U of S to access the registration site on PAWS, but I’m getting reports from people that they do seem to like the university’s new registration system so far. It is new, so the [...] From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Dr. Brown new Head of EDCUR
Barry Brown has been appointed as the new department head of Curriculum Studies. Don’t worry, he’ll still be as active as ever in the Educational Communications and Technology program. He has moved his office into the Curriculum Studies suite, but his other contact information remains the same. Congratulations, Barry! From
Rick's Café Canadien on July 22, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
NinJam
This is pretty cool. NimJam allows people to collaborate to make music online. The big problem with jamming online is latency - there is a lag between what you play and what the other person hears. NimJam addresses this by extending the latency so it's a full interval, allowing the musicians to get back in synch. The software is free and open source; the music produced is Creative Commons. Via
CC. By Various Authors, Cockos, July, 2005 [
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Web 2.0 checklist 2.0
A checklist describing fundamental properties of web 2.0. Not everything it could be, and more description would be nice, but it offers an outline. From the same author, a link to a
conversation tracker on BlogPulse. By Arnaud Leene, Hovering Above, July 21, 2005 [
Refer][
Research][
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Before Every Child is Left Behind: How Epistemic Games Can Solve the Coming Crisis in Education
According to the authors, "Epistemic games of all kinds make it possible for students of all ages to learn by working as innovators. In playing epistemic games, students learn basic skills, to be sure. They learn the 'facts' and 'content' that we currently reward. But in epistemic games students learn facts and content in the context of innovative ways of thinking and working. They learn in a way that sticks, because they learn in the process of doing things that matter." The authors introduce the subject by means of a 'crisis' - the flattening of the world econom From
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Introducing IMS ePortfolio, Part 3: Binding
Following from the first two parts, which I posted here yesterday, Scott Wilson looks specifically at the XML binding in the IMS e-portfolio specification, describing its origins in two previous IMS specifications, Learner Information Package (LIP) and Content Packaging, and evaluating the spec on completeness, clarity and usability. By Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, July 22, 2005 [
Refer][
Resear From OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Bill Gates' Guinea Pigs
So just what is the Gates Foundation doing with schools. This article describes the experience of one school, Mountlake Terrace High School near Seattle, which became five schools. Smaller schools - and that's the core of the rehabilitation program. The conversion is a lot of work, a lot of upheaval, and not clearly a success. Moreover, working with a large entity like the Gates Foundation brings its own issues. Thanks to
Ben Watson for the link. By Bob Geballe, Seattle Weekly, July 20, 2005 [
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Comments on REL patents, Third-Party Standards, and MPEG LA
A fascinating email sent by Steve Rowat to the ODRL-interest mailing list. Rowat first notes that he left the patent business because "I no longer felt morally justified in being part of an industry that routinely stole from, blocked, or in other ways interfered with inventors who legitimately owned their own creation." I have often expressed this view of the patent industry, but it is unusual to see an insider express it. He then looks at how closely ODRL should cooperate with MPEG-REL, noting it "may also be that bowing to such a demand - to pay for patents that are likely not valid to begin From
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
E-learning for Target Learner Groups HYPHEN Youth
It has a publication date of March 31 but it showed up in the EdNA RSS feed on Wednesday. This report surveys major topics in learning for youth - the 'digital native', games, mobile learning, blogs. Some good content pointing clearly to the defects of traditional classroom instruction. That said, I found the selection of resources odd, and not simply because the report did not cite a single thing I've written on these topics. I can understand citing Prensky on the new learner, for example, but how does
a summary of Obli From OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Where Can I Find Good Tech Articles
I have run a few posts critical of various authors and editors recently (including in this issue). I want to be clear that people shouldn't feel singled out when I do this - the articles selected are merely representative of a type of criticism I want to make, and not an indication that I think so-and-so is doing a bad job. Hey, sure, maybe I'm in no position to criticize. But I think it's relevant to sound a cautionary note, to urge people to read critically and to read widely, and to search for - and link to - quality writing, wherever it may be found. By Mike Zarro, W From
OLDaily on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 p.m..
Mad Ave marketing mumbojumbo
Mad Ave marketing mumbojumbo. From the story: "The question remains whether all media should be treated on the same basis in terms of engagement, because finding the right metric that works across all media is difficult." Right.
'Engagement' May Supplant 'Frequency' as Metric. Madison Avenue has turned to "consumer engagement" as its new media planning metric - one that could replace "frequency" as the multiplier in most media plans, MediaPost reports(via... From
Bill Brandon: eLearning on July 22, 2005 at 4:48 p.m..
Cookies and the Privacy Conundrum
Yesterday I participated as a panelist in a program put on by the
Chicago Interactive Marketing Association. The topic of the day was behavioral targeting, the increasingly prevalent practice by websites (and advertising networks) of using previous Web usage patterns to target ads more effectively.For instance, consider a user who visits a couple of auto reviews on Tuesday and on Thursday is reading about local news. Using behavioral targeting systems, this person could be shown a car ad on the local news page. There are numerous
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on July 22, 2005 at 3:57 p.m..
Word of the Day: Stigmergy
Reading Rohit Gupta's latest
article on Online Journalism Review ("The avatar versus the journalist: Making meaning, finding truth"), I encountered a term that I had not seen before. "Stigmergy," according to Wikipedia's
entry, was coined by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grass in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." More generally, it now refers to "a method of communication . From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on July 22, 2005 at 2:54 p.m..
Mary Poppins On Speed
Mary Poppins got it right when she sang the famous song Let's Go Fly a Kite, but she made a mistake in getting more airtime with her umbrella than with the kite. Bad move. Now you can make amends by recreating famous scenes from the Disney classic with the aid of giant kites! From
kuro5hin.org on July 22, 2005 at 2:45 p.m..
Anonymous Blogging Carries Career Risk
Now, we all know that blogging about your employer's secrets can get you in trouble with said employer. The casualty count of bloggers, writing anonymously and dishing from the inside, is well known. Of course, that doesn't stop people from sharing inside knowledge and taking the risk.According to the New York Post, the latest anonymous blogger to
lose her job (well, two jobs, actually) over a personal blog is Nadine Haobsh, 24, who was associate beauty editor for Ladies Home Journal magazi From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on July 22, 2005 at 1:55 p.m..
Osaka Visa Runs
For my readers in Korea in case you don't read Daves Cafe you may want to check out this thread. Ever since I have been in Korea (1997) it has been possible to do a visa run to osaka in one day. I never did as I preferred to stay one or two nights and explore. However one poster reports that "I got my visa on July 8th and was told by the lady handing out visas that the one-day run is soon to end. She gave me a slip of paper that said we were to tell our employers that the visa process will take 2 days from August 10." If you will be needing to make a run to Osaka after August 10th, you ma From
Language, teaching, and all things EFL on July 22, 2005 at 10:51 a.m..
Rebecca on doing business with China - and Newsweek's sloppiness
Newsweek's Web site runs an interview with Rebecca MacKinnon about the complicity of US tech companies in China's amazingly detailed suppression of the openness of the Net. Rebecca also blogs about Newsweek's sloppy characterization of her. As she notes, it's not a big deal, except that the MSM keep telling us that they're better than bloggers because they have fact checkers, they're professionals, they get their facts right, etc. [Technorati tags: RebeccaMackinnon Newsweek China]... From
Joho the Blog on July 22, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
The Robots Are Coming! - JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN, ABC News
For those of us begrudgingly driving our non-flying cars to work every day and being forced to take vacations in the Bahamas rather than on the moon, you may feel like science has let you down. But fear not, because in a move that will certainly redeem t From
Techno-News Blog on July 22, 2005 at 8:49 a.m..
Firefox gets hotter - InfoWorld Weblog
The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser upped its market share to 8.71 percent in June, continuing its steady march upward. The figures were released this week by NetApplications.com, a Web site measuring and monitoring application provider. While Fire From
Techno-News Blog on July 22, 2005 at 8:49 a.m..
Buzzwords slow to grab US surfers - BBC
Buzzwords to describe the latest trends on the net, such as "RSS", "podcasting" and "phishing", are largely unknown to US web users, according to a survey. Research body, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that only 9% had a "good idea" wh From
Techno-News Blog on July 22, 2005 at 8:49 a.m..
Ted Nelson en la eWeek
Carlos Scolari ha anunciado que en la próxima edición de la eWeek que se celebrará en noviembre traerá a uno de los pioneros del hipertexto: Ted Nelson. Ver: "No todos los usuarios quieren ser productores de información." Entrevista a Carlos... From
eCuaderno v.2.0 on July 22, 2005 at 7:47 a.m..
Collapsed Ice Shelf Exposes Life
Researchers investigating the breakup of a massive ice shelf in Antarctica discover a mystery ecosystem deep below the sea surface, including mud volcanoes and large clams. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
NASA Aims for Tuesday Launch
Although no precise cause has been found to explain the failure of a fuel gauge that scrubbed last week's shuttle launch, the feeling is to proceed with Discovery's mission -- unless something concrete surfaces. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Scrubbing Bubbles Hit the Streets
A joint Swedish-Finnish venture is working to develop catalytic concrete products that will dissolve pollutants. The technology for self-cleaning surfaces already exists, but can it be applied on a large enough scale to combat pollution? From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Vioxx Suit Faults Animal Tests
A lawsuit filed by a medical ethics group claims that Merck wrongfully relied on animal research when the drug company downplayed health risks of its pain medication Vioxx. By John Gartner. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Trying to Locate The Island
Veering between serious science fiction and summer action blockbuster, The Island is a film that can't quite decide what it wants to be. By Jason Silverman. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Net Dating Is Painful Reality TV
A reality show about online dating leaves out two things our sex-tech columnist wanted to see: reality and the internet. Commentary by Regina Lynn. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Game Over for Modders?
The controversy surrounding a graphic sex scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas puts pressure on the 'modding' community of tinkerers that surrounds many popular games. By Kevin Poulsen. From
Wired News on July 22, 2005 at 6:45 a.m..
Digg: Collaborative Technology News Website
I just came across Digg (via Daypop) and it seems like it's based on a pretty neat idea. Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the [...] From
Couros Blog - Frequent Rants from an Ed. Tech'er on July 22, 2005 at 4:56 a.m..
How To Make Enhanced Podcasts
MAKE recently produced a very detailed article on how to created enhanced podcasts, "audio files that can have slideshows, URLs and some cool features." I love the idea, and would love to try incorporating this into my courses ... the article even includes some neat ideas for learning integration . Neat stuff! However, the BIG [...] From
Couros Blog - Frequent Rants from an Ed. Tech'er on July 22, 2005 at 4:56 a.m..
Digg: Collaborative Technology News Website
I just came across Digg (via Daypop) and it seems like it's based on a pretty neat idea. Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the [...] From
Couros Blog - Frequent Rants from an Ed. Tech'er on July 22, 2005 at 3:47 a.m..
Comparison of face to face and real-time online learning results
Comparison of face to face and real-time online learning results. A Matched Study between a Face-to-face Section and a Real-Time Online Section of a University. "The issue here, therefore, is not which venue is better or worse. The intent of this inquiry was simply to understand – in terms of similarities and differences – online and F2F learning settings, findings upon which we hope can lead to more relevant online learning theories that result in improved teaching effectiveness across the board. ...In sum, during these three hour sessions, it was found that the n From
Bill Brandon: eLearning on July 21, 2005 at 11:48 p.m..