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by Stephen Downes
December 26, 2008

We Have the Ideas and the Technologies - What Changes in the System Do We Need for Open Education?
Graham Attwell writes, "A further piece in the jigsaw is the move towards Personal Learning Environments. PLEs are important in allowing individuals to organise and manage their own learning, regardless of where that learning takes place. PLEs can provide a framework for scaffolding and reflection on learning." What needs to change, though, are systems of accreditation and assessment. When we separate teaching from testing, we will unleash a system that allows people to manage their own learning in a wide variety of ways. This is not about the privatization of education - I think that government should b providing the systems and supports that enable personal learning. But it is about enabling personal empowerment in learning, and in the long run, a much more effecient, effective and accessible system. Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, December 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Assessment, Tests and Testing, Accessibility, Personal Learning Environment] [Comment]

Yonkly
Yonkly is to Twitter what Ning is to Facebook. Via Jane Hart. Neither Yonkly nor Ning get it quite right - what I want to see is a distributed network, not a proliferation of private networks. Various Authors, Website, December 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Twitter, Networks] [Comment]

How Cisco's CEO John Chambers Is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist
An interesting take on new technology: the corporation gets socialist. I wonder whether they'll discover that something like democratic decision-making works, too. Via Jay Cross. Ellen McGirt, Fast Company, December 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Cisco] [Comment]

Answers On Expertise
Alexandre Enkerli follows up his post on expertise. "Mass media coverage of academic research was the basis of series of entries on the original Language Log, including one of my favourite blogposts, Mark Liberman's Language Log: Raising standards - by lowering them. The main point, I think, is that secluded academics in the Ivory Tower do little to alleviate this problem." Alexandre Enkerli, Disparate, December 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Research, Academia, Web Logs] [Comment]

Did Not Get That Music Toy You Wanted for Xmas? Try JamStudio
One of the things that really wowed me about the MacBook was Garage Band, the application that allows you to create your own music. Don't have a Mac? Alan Levine points you to this site, which allows you to do much the same thing, in a web 2.0 online environment. You'll have to pay for some of the extra features, though. Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, December 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

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