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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Corn Hill Nursery

Jul 12, 2004

Days like this I wonder whether I'm getting old and ossified. My Edu_RSS system stubbornly refuses to harvest beyond a certain point because of a database that keeps 'going away' for no apparent reason. Nobody to help me with this; I'm on my own. In the world of e-learning, meanwhile, the systems and protocols look more and more like jibberish each passing day as every possible requirement from every possible system - whether it makes sense or not - is piled into that tangle of 24-character variable names called Java (none of which will work at all unless you have exactly the right configuration, somewhat like my database). Again, maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that if you need an advanced degree to make this stuff work (and of course it have to be exactly the right kind of degree) then it's just not going to work. It won't, it can't. Because learning, above all, must be a populist enterprise. Now I'm not proposing that we go back to the world of stone tools and chalk. But the last time I looked people weren't using learning objects in any great number, either in the classroom or (even more so) to support home learning. Gosh, make sure you can float before building a battleship. Am I really just an old fuddy-duddy who doesn't get it? Maybe so. Maybe I should retire from this line of work and become a photographer. Then I can call my pictures any name I want and if you don't have exactly the same configuration as I do, don't worry, the pictures will still display just fine. Oh, and you can learn how to use a digital camera in an afternoon.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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