John Dvorak recently wrote on The Myth of Disruptive Technology. Here’s my favourite line: The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium. Yeah – sure thing, John. Coincidentally, many people consider John Dvorak to be the biggest crock of the old millenium (which begs the question why someone is still paying him to write?). I can only comment that John Dvorak would probably have told Johannes Gutenberg was wasting his time with the printing press. I guess history will be the judge.

Frontier has been released as an open source project. Continue reading »

Students offended by distribution of printed listserv postings | Kairosnews :: So, if you had participated in a class listserv, how would you feel if the instructor printed up the archives of the listserv and handed it out to your group as a tool for stimulating discussing? The students of the instructor quoted in the story apparently were quite upset by having their words thrown back in their faces. You’d have thought I’d thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he’d always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I’d broken his confidence–”It’s one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but when you print it out like that, I feel violated.” I’m not sure if I understand … Continue reading »

Click here to become infected :: The Register is reporting on a new reason to make sure you ditch Internet Explorer, and if you are using IE on Windows I can’t think of a better reason than this. This exploit uses a javascript extension proprietary to Internet Explorer to download an executable file to your computer hard drive. This could allow your computer to be used to send out junk e-mail, or even be used to keep track of your passwords. Yep – the next computer will be a Mac. (or Linux)

From BBC News, India launches learning satellite. According to the article, the project took 3 years and $17 million. Its great to see large scale projects that are dedicated to education; in this case the Edusat is going to be used to train teachers in India and link classrooms throughout the country. It is a goal of this project to reach remote regions that may not have previously had as many educational opportunities.

Alec Couros has recently advocated getting a Mac as a means of protection against spyware. True enough, but there are other methods: If you are using Windows, get Firefox! Firefox is a great browser, and a project of the Mozilla foundation. Mozilla is the open source project that started when Netscape released the program code to their browser, and current (and presumably future) versions of Netscape Navigator are based on the Mozilla browser. Using Firefox is like using next year’s version of Navigator. It is not susceptable to some of the spyware and other malicious programs that use Internet Explorer to gain access to your computer.

wiley.ed.usu.edu – The Wrath of Kaa: A Letter to the Editors of The Register :: David Wiley has written an open letter to the editors of the Register taking them to task on their criticism of Wikipedia as an example of an open education project. It is too bad that the Register is taking such an elitist stance on such issues, since an honest and forthright dialog about Wikipedia and other open educational projects could be beneficial. Consider, however, this stunning piece of criticism: We’ll be asking the Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge why they don’t “Get It!” and exactly when they plan to close down their institutions very shortly, we promise. With such a mortal challenge to their legitimacy, they must be planning for that day already. As one of those whom the Register would consider to be wiki-twiddlers, … Continue reading »

cogdogblog: Beautiful, Textbook Instructional Design… I Yawned All the Way to the Post Test::Alan Levine compares his experience with a beautifully designed, technically perfect piece of online instruction with the way he really learns what he needs to do in order to do his job. I appreciate his lament that there is a lot of technically very well constructed instructional design that, for all its technical perfection, is nothing more than an electronic textbook or some variety of programmed instruction. His own informal, on-the-job learning is somewhat different: There is no next-next-next path to my everyday informal, experimental, iterative learning and I rely in my circle of online experts to help out when they can, or to dig until I can find an answer or an alternative approach. I repeat this almost every day, and my own dynamic form of … Continue reading »

So far the transition to WordPress is going nicely. I have imported all my old entries from Movable Type, but all the old draft posts require that I change the date or else they show up as today (or whatever day I move them from draft to publish status). It would be much more convenient if the draft posts from MT were imported as a private entry within WP. I can see that I will also need to spend some time organizing my categories in some logical fashion instead of my previous practice of pretty much creating a new category for each post. But I am having fun! :^)

Ta-da – presenting the new and improved stigmergicweb! I have been wanting to try some new blogging tools for a while for a few different projects. D’Arcy Norman suggested WordPress, and I liked what I saw. I added Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme, and really liked what I saw! The transfer over of all my entries from Movable Type was so simple as to make me giggle with glee. This is a big jump for me! I have been a Movable Type user for a couple of years, and have become quite comfortable with it, even to the extent of poking around with templates and plugins. When forced to look for some new tools, however, I decided that I might as well make the jump complete. Addendum – I just noticed that something in the wp-comments script is pooched. I hope … Continue reading »