OLDaily, by Stephen Downes

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July 20, 2011

Why I will never pursue cheating again
Panos Ipeirotis, A Computer Scientist in a Business School, July 20, 2011.


There's nothing funnier than an article that has been retracted from the internet. Because, you know, nothing is ever retracted from the internet. That's why, when I went looking for this article from Panos Ipeirotis and found it missing from his blog, I simply did a site-specific search on The Google and found the cache version. Which I link here, for posterity, because it has made a splash on Metafilter and was widely cited in the student blogosphere. Ipeirotis wrote (probably to the chagrin of his administration) "By the end of the semester, 22 students admitted cheating, out of the 108 enrolled in the class. The process of discussing all the detected cases was not only painful, it was extremely time consuming as well." Instead, he plans "to use assignments that are inherently not amenable to cheating: public projects, peer reviewing and competitions.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Cheating, Web Logs, Google]

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Five Tips for Creating Fresh Blog Content Fast. Every Day
Paul Farol, The Blog Herald, July 20, 2011.


People often ask how I do this newsletter and the other things I do. I suspect the reaction is often, "that's a lot of work." But as the Blog Herald says, "it sounds like work and it IS work, but having a plan and working according to plan can actually minimize the time you spend working and maximize productive offline time." This post described that process, a process that is all the more relevant given the emergence of the MOOC, because the most important part of the MOOC, as I stated again today in the informal eduMOOC webcast, is the daily newsletter. At least, that's been my experience. This list is focused toward a 'client', but substitute 'readership' or 'participants' and you get the same results.

The five keys are:
- a "client bible... should contain all the information about the client and it should be organized for easy referencing."
- a "road map... to have a clear sense of what your major goals are within a defined period of time."
- "templates or formulas for news articles, essays, reviews, and stream of thought articles"
- "a sense of what everybody is talking about and how you can participate"
- assessment and metrics, in the form of traffic, comments and backlinking.
Hm. Come to think of it, I don't have any of these in a formal way. Does this show they are unnecessary, or that I could be improving my practice?

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Linking and Deep Linking, Experience, Assessment, Newsletters]

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EduMOOCosphere
Various Authors, eduMOOC, July 20, 2011.


If you want to get a sense of the variety that is possible within a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) have a look at this. If you prefer a week-by-week recap, look here. The next live event is tomorrow, July 21.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: none]

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Learning to Teach Online: a Professional Development resource
Tony Bates, e-learning and distance education resources, July 20, 2011.


files/images/Planning-your-online-class-300x185.jpg, size: 10979 bytes, type:  image/jpeg Tony Bates points to the Learning to Teach Online project and short five-minute videos designed to help new online teachers. But then he writes, "I found these clips to be so short and superficial that they really didn’t provide any real help at all." And he says "It does though fit well with what I call the amateurish, ‘it’s up to you’, professional development model of asking those with just a bit more experience to help those without any." Isn't it time, he suggests, that we offered support for online teaching "on a more professional basis, built around research into learning, and best practices in online teaching linked to theory and practical examples, with evaluation and research supporting such practices?"

But now. He writes, "For these reasons I find the professional development material from the UK’s JISC and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework much more professional and useful." Really? Now I am a great supporter of both the Flexible Learning Framework and JISC. But are these sites so much better? The Australian link is to the toolboxes - and that's it. For support there's a phone number. As for the JISC link, well, I don't know what it is. It quickly devolves into a typical JISC labyrinth of project pages and reports from 2005. Is this the best way Bates can think of to help people learn about OERs? One of my most persistent observations about online learning is that the experts in the field really don't do just a great job of doing it.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Open Educational Resources, Great Britain, Project Based Learning, Video, Research, Experience, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Australia, Online Learning, Teaching Online]

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files/images/gphangouts.jpg, size: 48054 bytes, type:  image/jpeg
Where to hangout at Google+
Various Authors, Website, July 20, 2011.


Interesting way to schedule Google Hangouts; you can see when hangouts are scheduled, and add your own hangout to the schedule. Via Lifehacker.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Google]

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Ed Radio - Show Notes - 2011 07 20
Stephen Downes, Ed Radio, July 20, 2011.


- Janis Joplin - Ball and Chain - Wolfgang's Vault
- Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone, Stop Putting the Front-end Last, Web 2.0 Conference, IT Conversations
- Paramore: Monster
- Lifehacker, Make a 3D Scanner from a Webcam, Laser Pointer, and Free Software, see also Tinkernut
- Julia Grace, Location is Dead! Long Live Location! Where 2.0 Conference, IT Conversations
- Blue Notes Records on Open Culture, Classic Jazz Album Covers Animated, or the Re-Birth of Cool
- Buddypress Courseware, found on Clarence Fisher, Remote Access
- Martha & the Vandellas - Heatwave - via The Awl
- Justin Shaffer, Facebook Invites Developers to Open Graph API, Where 2.0 Conference, IT Conversations
- The Patinettes, Mystic Monkey, from Jamendo
- Scott Summitt and The Future of 3D printing via connecting the dots
- The Patinettes, The man With the Electric Flag, from Jamendo
- Larry Anderson with Anna Adam, Lucy Gray, Carol Anne McGuire, Niki Peel and Julene Reed, Podcasting and Mobile Media for Teaching and Learning, ISTE 2011
- LIVE Google+ Hangout with Jeff Lebow in the eduMOOC course
- Rob Shaw, The Machine: Top Prize Winner at the Robot Film Festival
- Derek Silvers, Obvious to you, Amazing to others and A Real Person, A Lot Like You, via E-Learning Blog
- Dialogue 2000 Electronic Village
- Fostering Change Through Leadership – An Interview with Dr. Eric Williams, November Learning
- Credence Crearwater Revival - I Heard It Through the Grapevine
- Tori Amos - She's Your Cocaine
- Shania Twain - If It Don't Take Two
- The Story of Us: Symphony of Science - "Children of Africa"
- Learning from WOeRK project overview
- The Patinettes, Whiskey Galore, from Jamendo
- Mentors In Black - The Prologue, Epsiode 1, Epsiode 2, Epsiode 3
- The Patinettes, Milky Day, from Jamendo

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Web 2.0, Books, Project Based Learning, Video, Leadership, Google, Networks, Africa, Hackers]

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Ed Radio - Show Notes - 2011 07 19
Stephen Downes, Ed Radio, July 19, 2011.


A shorter show on the 19th, featuring a live broadcast in the middle.

- Amy Sky - Love Yourself
- PLE Conference, Tuesday morning 9:30 am Keynote1 unkeynote with Scott Wilson and Cristina Costa (sound was really awful)
- PLE Conference, Tuesday morning 10:20 am parallel 1 Learners Perspective on PLEs (sound was really awful)
- LIVE broadcast - Mitchell Levy and Cathy Casserly, OER Session 1—Defining OER: The WHAT and the WHY
- The Google Plus Trailer (The Social Network Parody), shared by Twechy Tim Wechy
- Rob Michael (photos), Uke, Google+
- Kirsty McColl - Terry
- k.d. lang - Hallelujah
- Jane Siberry - Mary Had a Little Lamb
- Elton John - Michelle's Song

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Open Educational Resources, Open Content, Google]

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Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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