D’Arcy Norman @ The Learning Commons – Thoughts on Stephen Downes’ ITI Keynote Darcy Norman has some notes and thoughts about Stephen Downes ITI keynote. One idea that D’Arcy (and others) have picked up on is the way that the context for good education is on the edge of order and chaos – The hierarchical top-down ordained-from-above crap just won’t fly in practice. Finding that balance is the biggest challenge in teaching. I’m sensing a bit of a movement away from the paradigm of large repositories of static learning objects towards an approach to online learning that embraces spontaneous activity of learners and learning communities. D’Arcy and Stephen both mention Brian Lamb and Alan Levine’s paradigm of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control as an effective way of organizing online learning in actual practice.

As mentioned in the other blog, I’m looking for a weblog tool but I’m not sure it exists yet: an end-user interface as intuitive as Blogger. Their interface redesign since becoming acquired by Google has been brilliant, and shows what the user interface should be. I need a tool that will not be used by techno-savvy users, and I can’t ask them to learn HTML (or any other text encoding markup). Nor do I want to subject them to having to look at HTML. Most people understand word processors pretty well so use that as the metaphor. output valid XHTML and use CSS to control layout. free, open-source software. installed on my server. Blogger is great, except that it is controlled by someone else. I can’t guarantee my partners in this project that it will never cost them anything. If … Continue reading »

Stephen Downes has posted his powerpoint slides and the audio of his presentation at ITI recently in Utah. I have only skimmed over the slides (although the question could be asked if one can do more than skim a powerpoint presentation) but as usual there is plenty of food for thought here. I expect the audio will enhance the presentation by an order of magnitude. In my judgement, Stephen has done a great job not only of seeing the outline of what the ants are building, but also making it much clearer for the rest of us to see. BTW – the audio download is maxing at about 19.5 KB per second (on a DSL line), and the size of the file is 66.1 MB. Start the download before your coffee break, and you should be fine.