Signs of spring

Ah signs of renewal are starting to show up in the ed-tech-blogosphere, most notable being a lively fresh rant from David Wiley entitled Pedagogy-Agnostic Standards and a Much Needed Rant. A brief sample:

Why would we turn the greatest enabler of social interaction into a simple data download service? It’s like the great sequence of scenes in Real Genius. At a top school (I alway thought it was supposed to be CMU, for some reason) a lecture room is full of students and a professor. But before long, the professor has been replaced by a reel-to-reel, and students simply scrawl down notes from the recorder. By the end, the reel-to-reel plays in the front to a room empty of all but miniature tape recorders. That is the direction all this automation madness is going, you know.

Despite labelling his treatise as a rant, David is actually someone who can reliably be trusted to seek out the humane use of technology as a tool for learning.

David also mentions the latest issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, which has the Educational Semantic Web as its focus.