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by Stephen Downes
September 21, 2007

Pink Floods School Hallways in Bid for Tolerance
Cheers to the students from Nova Scotia today who launched an anti-bullying campaign by wearing pink in their school. The students were supporting another student who was push around for wearing a pink shirt on his first day of school. More from the Link] [Tags: Bullying, Schools] [Comment]

LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers
Interesting set of comparisons of LMSs in large and small corporate environments, as well as the educational sector. What is striking is the strong performance of Moodle in all three categories. The figures are from the eLearningGuild's Learning Management System research report. Tony Karrer, eLearning Technology September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Research, Ontologies, Online Learning] [Comment]

New Way of Learning - Online With a Lot of Friends
The marketing has started - hnce the TechCrunch post - but all we're being told now is that it's a "massive multiplayer online learning" product. Interesting list of references, though. Bill Brantley, Design of Knowledge September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Marketing, Online Learning] [Comment]

What Is Xtreme Podcasting?
I'm not sure I would call this 'Xtreme Podcasting' - it bears only a faint resemblance to Xtreme Programming. Maybe 'structured podcasting'. "We're trying to help people take their podcasting to the next level by delving more deeply into the design process of producing an effective, educational podcast. How? Primarily by taking an instructional design approach, and analyzing information needs and audiences to determine if podcasting is the right match with your instructional needs." Or maybe, 'taking the joy out of it podcasting'. Jane Himmel and Julie Navar, Blackboard Educate Innovate September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Podcasting] [Comment]

Bornstein, Kawasaki, Changing the World
You can change the world, but I think the world has to want to change. How many leaders, I wonder, looked to see where things were going, leapt out in front, and then got lucky as events bore out their original vision? That's how businesses operate - they keep trying, until something sticks. CEOs are just as often lucky as they are good. You can't do that in the non-profit sector. you can't just say, "Well Cambodia isn't selling, I think I'll try Gabon." And you can't just go 'out of business' and start over from scratch. Anyhow, this post summarizes David Bornstein's How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Harvard Bookstore Claims IP Over Book Prices
I'm pretty sure it's not copyrightable - it's just data - but that doesn't help the people who were kicked out of the store for writing down the prices of the books. More. Glenda Morgan, Accidental Pedagogy September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Patents, Copyrights] [Comment]

Exploitive Corporate Scum Love Creative Commons
The discussion is a lot more reasonable than the headline sounds. The point is that it seems clear thant commercial entities are using Creative Commons tagged photos and content in advertising. Sounds fine - but what about the unpaid models appearing in the photo, photographed as they were just walking down the street minding their own business? Now I read today that this is OK in the U.S., but Canadian privacy laws prohibit the commercial use of a person's image without their permission. Which means it's fine for me to take photos and use them noncommercially - but if my image, no matter how it's tagged, is used commerically, someone's in trouble. Brian Lamb, Abject Learning September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Marketing, Canada, Privacy Issues] [Comment]

We Are Opening the Social Graph
"We think," writes Six Apart's David Recordon, "that making the social graph visible is a powerful and necessary first step to freeing people from managing their network of relationships one piece at a time." With a GPL version of Moveable Type coming soon and open source prototype applications that open up the management of social networks, we will have the functionality we enjoy today on places like Facebook available anywhere on the web. OpenID, of course, plays a big role in this, as well as related open standards such as FOAF and XFN. David Recordon, Six Apart September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Open Source, Networks, Books, Open Standards] [Comment]

Dr. Alfred Crockus and Crosley Shelvador, M.D.
Oy. I think that the lecturing career of Dan Hodgins - an "internationally known presenter" - is about to come to a screeching halt. This stems from a teacher who reported that "Red flags went up for me when, very early in his presentation, he showed a drawing of the brain and claimed that, 'Girls see the details of experiences... Boys see the whole but not the details.'" A detailed examination of Hodgins's claim found no evidence of the difference - nor of the brain region he describes, the 'Crockus' ("the detailed section of the brain, a part of the frontal lope"), nor of the supposed discoverer of the Crockus, Dr. Alfred Crockus, nor the Boston Medical University Hospital, where Crockus is supposed to have worked. The name, indeed, bears more resemblance to slang than to any living human (or human brain area). Crockus is about to come into existence, however, as a new award, the Dr. Alfred Crockus Award for the misuse of neuroscience. Hodgins has presented - as a keynote, no less - at a disturbingly large number of education conferences. More from Mind Hacks, Body Impolitic, Auntie Em's, Magnolia77sc, Ann Bartow, Alibi. Mark Liberman, Language Log September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Experience] [Comment]

Teachers Discovering the Musician Within: GarageBand Is Key
OK, I didn't think much of the music samples offered in this post, but I'm not really into funk. What I will say is that, like Clay Burell, I was amazed to discover what GarageBand can do, and I think it's an absolutely fantastic tool to use to teach people music. Though you do need a Mac to do it, which can get a bit expensive. Clay Burell, Beyond School September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Controlled Vocabularies
Canada maintains a registry of controlled vocabularies for use in Dublin Core metadata elements. This page links to a wide variety of them, including audience, coverage, format, various subjects, and more. It's a good example of a controlled vocabulary, but may not be useful for everyone, as it is fairly narrowly targeted. And sometimes the choices are odd; in the audience vocabulary, for example, you can specify 'women' as an audience, but not 'men'. Related: the Government of Canada DC application profile for resource discovery. There is also a guide to the development of controlled vocabularies in Canada by the Government On-Line (GOL) Metadata Working Group. I've been subscribed to the GOL's mailing list for many years. Various Authors, Library and Archives Canada September 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Canada, Metadata] [Comment]

 

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