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Is learning migrating away from universities?
Tony Hirst sent me this story from TechCrunch about Grockit securing venture capital to develop a ‘Massive multiplayer online learning’ system. The idea is that people learn best from each other and the system will use network effects to facilitate education. It’s not actually true that people learn best from each all the time by the way, you don’t necessarily learn quantum physics by hanging around with your mates down the pub (although you can get as far as Brownian motion by observing your pint) – sometimes experts, (whisper it) teachers are useful. But putting aside their over-simplistic pedagogic spin, there is as I and others have been noting, something…
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A technorati double life
I am not obsessed by my Technorati ranking (okay, maybe a little), but as I struggle to get my authority increased I was puzzled to see that this blog is listed twice. One I have claimed, but one unclaimed with a higher authority. It turns out this is a problem arising from how Typepad handles domain names. Sadly my authority is not the sum of these two. I can ask Technorati to combine them I think, but more simply I’ll claim the later. In technorati now you have to create a blog post with some code in it. So here it is – I just couldn’t bring myself to post…
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Is imperfect material better for encouraging participation?
In an earlier post I mentioned that people weren’t adapting openlearn material much. Similarly, the FLOSScom summer university hasn’t seen as much input as we’d like (you can still input, just go there, register and edit pages). There are a number of possible reasons for this, such as the ease of modification, the cultural attitude towards reuse in the audience, the size of audience, the motivation to adapt, etc. One additional factor that occurred to me was that maybe blank or very incomplete resources are better if you want participation. The openlearn content is very good, and has been through extensive editing and review as part of the OU process.…
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elearning 2.0 and Christensen
At a meeting yesterday I talked some bobbins around web 2.0 and education. My last slide provided a Christensen/Innovator’s dilemma analysis (see below). I have some reservations about the disruptive technology theory, or rather its over-application to everything, but putting those to one side, I wanted to look at how we might use it to look at the web 2.0 versions of OU e-learning. So, I took a list of OU concepts and provided a Sustaining and Disruptive version. My set of concepts were: So if we take the disruptive technologies model, then these appeal to a different audience, while the sustaining ones appeal to the existing audience. So from…
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Learning from Facebook
Susan Mernit has a nice post on 10 things we can learn from Facebook (and other fads). I particularly liked: 2. Local is a state of mind. 7. Forget Starbucks, the third place is digital. Got 5 minutes? Need a break? That place you like to go is probably right on your screen. 8. Passive versus active still matters–but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It’s still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT–smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging…
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Girls hooked on DS
Tech Digest (via Ewan McIntosh) carries a report that 7 year old girls are ‘addicted to’ (ie prefer) Nintendo DSs over traditional toys such as Barbie. My (5 year old) daughter has one and this certainly rings true for her. Games such as Pet Hotel, Ponyz, Dogz and Absolutely Anything to do With Animalz (okay I made that last one up), are great fun, and as I’ve blogged before, they keep her entertained at restaurants. But I’ve noticed something else recently, and that is since having a DS, she plays with her physical toys much more. She has never been that keen on playing with toys, but now spends hours…
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Is education intrinsically a bit dull?
This question has been bothering me lately. Like everyone and their (lol)cat I am much taken by the enthusiasm, community, user involvement and creativity found in social networking/web 2.0 sites, and look on them rather covetously for education purposes. I feel like I’m at a big dinner event and on the table next to mine everyone is laughing and having a great time, while on my table we are haveing very earnest discussions about the Iraq war. It’s interesting, but after a while, you want to find an excuse to join the other table, or at least get some of them to swap on to your table. We’re in the…
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Lijit and connected learning
AJ pointed me at Ligit – it’s a socially enhanced search engine. I’ve installed it on my blog, hanging around there on the left. When you sign up it asks you for your blog address, and then what name you commonly use for accounts and then searches for these, e.g. delicious, digg, flickr, twitter, etc. You can remove any, and edit it you have a different account name. This part made me realise I’m not as connected as I should be – to my shame I hardly use delicious (just a habit thing), don’t use digg at all, have a very old Flickr account, etc. The other data it uses…
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Mo’ Facebook
Richard Scoble has a good post on Why Facebook, why now? After noting some of the criticisms (and his follow on post about a lot of the apps simply not working in Facebook is right also, but we’ll pretend they do for now), he argues that Facebook is successful over LinkedIn because it’s personal. He also points to the quality of the people and the applications (if they worked). AJ suggests that the reason Facebook has stickability is Skinnerian conditioning and Tony Hirst suggests ways in which a status like function could be mined to aid learning and networking. I think Scoble is right about the social aspect of FB…
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An everyday, modern learning experience
I had a modest, but telling, learning experience the other day. It isn’t remarkable in any way, but it hints at what might be achievable and how learning will occur more often in the future. John Connell is one of my Facebook friends, although we have never met face to face, but we read and comment on each other’s blogs. I have added the virtual bookshelf application to my Facebook profile, and it displays Everything is Miscellaneous as the book I am currently reading. John saw this (I think this is what happened anyway), and posted a message on my wall suggesting I look at the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face…
