Stephen Downes has once again managed to drop the seed crystal into the super-saturated solution that is my brain (at least something about my brain is super). In a recent essay, Emergent Learning: Social Networks and Learning Networks, Stephen has drawn together several threads from his OLdaily newsletter to weave a common theme about the transformation of online learning. I’ve only just started reading it, and following some of the links, so its too early for a complete commentary yet. One quotation which did catch my eye (and make me think about it a few times) was this gem from James Farmer, posted on his blog: People don’t exist in environments, they exist in themselves and their semilattice-esque relationships with other actors (communities, individuals, spaces, inanimate objects…). To get the full meaning of that, I needed to re-read Christopher Alexander‘s … Continue reading »

I’m not sure if I happen to be on a bit of an anti-school rant this week, or if the rest of the world is just catching up to my point of view. ;^) Another great blog posting found its way to me today via Darren Cannell, and the title pulls no punches: Creating Passionate Users: Most classroom learning sucks by Kathy Sierra (co-author of the terrific Head First series published by O’Reilly. I think I would agree with Kathy on a number of points. Many times, school is mind-numbingly dull. For the most part, schools really don’t encourage or reward genuine thinking on the part of students (or staff or administration). Was it always this way? I don’t think so. I don’t believe it necessarily has to be this way. And I truly believe at the core of my … Continue reading »

Thanks to Stephen (to whom I extend heartfelt felicitations on his newly minted bilingualness)for the link to this: Yes, it’s only been ten years. And despite our memories of the crash of 2000, here are ten reasons why I believe that there’s about to be a significant flourishing of Net companies and business successes, not to mention extremely cool things for the rest of us:* Read more

I’ve just spend about an hour reading up on some differences between Blackboard and Moodle. My recent love affair with Moodle has been documented here earlier (the experiment continues, and is working out even better than I imagined), but I thought a little equal time should be spent looking at the competition. So I went to blackboard’s site (nope – no link, I’m not going to up their page rating), and I found it tainted with the miasma of corporate culture that is threatening to choke the learning out of the education system. I’ll need to write about this more sometime, but the marketing-speak about efficiency and standards-based confidence just makes me want to hurl. (Where did that word come from – I must have seen Wayne’s World on TV recently!) There’s a term that is missing from the marketing … Continue reading »

Its time for another stigmergicweb podcast! Here’s what I was on about this time: New Setup Using the recently released MixCast Live to record From the MixCast FAQ – The minimum hardware requirement is a microphone, headphones and a compatible soundcard. MixCast Live is designed to work with the minimum of hardware. TinyScience Radio is recorded with a $30 RadioShack microphone on a Pentium III with a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 sound card. Post production using Audacity to convert WAV to mp3 MCL is well worth the $59 (with a $20 discount for the pre-release) Excellent, excellent support from James Prudente, creator of MCL Shall we try a skype call? I wasn’t sure if this would work, but it did! Errata – at the end of the show, the word I was looking for was misanthropic, not misogynistic. When I listened … Continue reading »

Learning The Lessons of Nixon – 4 Minutes About Podcasting – Its actually closer to 5 minutes, if you include the credits. Well done – next time someone asks what this podcasting thing is all about, I’ll show them this video. Thanks to Lisa Williams for putting this together.

Rick Schwier mentioned in a class a while ago that Instructional Design was possibly one of the only design field that doesn’t habitually study design failures. This article – When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale about Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion and Interaction – is one instructor’s analysis of how he used blogs as a classroom tool/activity to unsatisfactory results (at least to him). Not only is this a fabulously honest analysis of the failings in this particular course design, it offers some valuable insight into how blogs may be used effectively. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

An interesting article – Why Does Windows Still Suck? Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms? Why isn’t everyone on a Mac? – was on the web site of the San Francisco gate today, written by Mark Morford. Precipitated by his significant others experience hooking her Wintel box to a DSL line for the first time (4 minutes before it was so beset by malicious code that it stopped working), its an interesting summary of some of the main points of frustration that many Windows users experience. As the author rightly points out, Windows seems to be able to get away with problems as no other commercial product on Earth would be allowed to. Imagine if a car were to be sold that was so buggy: Here is your brand new car, sir. Drive it … Continue reading »

Between 12:18 and 12:25 this morning, I was hit 217 times by comment spammers. Thanks to the Spaminator, none of them got through. If anyone is considering switching to WordPress, the Spaminator plug-in is reason enough! I realize I am tempting fate by announcing this. But I feel triumphant, although it may only be temporary.

Roy Peter Clark presents Fifty Writing Tools (thanks to Stephen for the heads up on this). One of the classes I taught last semester required students to write 2 fairly major papers. My academic training was originally in Genetics, and although I am occasionally capable of writing a decent paper, I have no idea where to start when it comes to teaching others how to write. Now I have a good place for them to start. The site may also come in handy when I get around to writing that thesis!