Article
September 16, 2005
I spent the day at the Canadian Heritage Information Network engaged in a lengthy and free-wheeling discussion of the concepts surrounding E-Learning 2.0 Although the
PowerPoint Slides for my presentation today are basically the same as those I used in Edmonton a few months ago, the discussio0n was much more wide ranging. Audio segments (each about an hour):
Part One,
Part Two,
Part Three.
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David Jonassen forays into the uncertain and unforgiving world of online discussion as he posts this article for examination by the group at ITForum. "To blog or not to blog, that is the question this week," he writes. But, "What is ignored in all of these venues is meaningful learning, because educators are too committed to instruction and too impelled by shallow conceptions of accountability." What we should be after, he argues, is "meaningful learning" which occurs "when we have a personal problem to solve." The remainder of the paper is devoted to unfortunately terse descriptions of six elements involved in meaningful learning, including authenticity, intentionality, meaningfulness, and more. [
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One day I hope to write a resource on grammar to complement my guide to the logical fallacies. In the mean time I will content myself to linking to online grammar resources. [
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It is tempting to depict Clay Skirkey's defense of tagging as setting up a false dilemma between tagging and classification, but I think his view is more that tagging forms one part of a wider picture. "Full text indexing, link analysis, trust networks, and related techniques now accomplish about 80% of what classification used to do for us." That's an image I can live with more easily than the caricature view that 'tagging will by itself replace classification'. In my view, the importance of tagging isn't large, because it has expressive limits, but that in combination with these other approaches - and especially link and text analyisis - it can play a role. And they key point - that classification has moved from the domain of experts to the domain of users - is, I think, unassailable. [
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This is the key point: "When you think about consistency, you’re thinking about the product. When you’re thinking about current knowledge, you’re thinking about the user. They are two sides of the same coin. We’ve just noticed that the designers who spend more time thinking about the users are the ones that end up with more usable designs." A point with which, in the main, I agree (the danger of the approach described here is in the creation of those horrible adaptive menus in Windows applications). [
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Interesting. "While there is high interest in identity federation, the technology is still in flux and will likely be more expensive and time-consuming to implement immediately rather than three years from now." The interest in a federation per se is shared mostly by content providers. However, web users have a very different interest - what I have called
self-identification - and uptake here may be much more rapid than Gartner suispects, and in an idea world, will usurp identity federations entirely. [
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Conversation from the crew at Ed Tech Talk. "This week's brainstorm included discussions of learning objects, differences between Elgg and Moodle, permanent digital portfolios for students, tech & time management challenges for teachers, national tech standards, first hand perspective of new media from an 11 year old podcaster."
MP3 Audio. [
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