Ulrich Schrader's Website

Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, May 18, 2012.

Now I'm not sure how a course you don't have to take and can leave at any time could be called a "tyranny" but I'll deal with the question raised in this post head on: "Are we are attempting to impose our values (of openness, sharing, online learning as the future of education, etc) without a critical examination of what that means for practice and for individuals who are part of social organizations?" And the short answer is: no. For two reasons. First, nobody's imposing anything here; if you want to go back to your structured formal education, where you pay a substantial fee, there are thousands of institutions who would be happy to help you. Second, the openness (and the rest of it) is the result of a critical examination. As I have argued with respect to the principles of successful networks, if you want your social organizations to be effective at all, you need to embrace things like autonomy, openness, interatcivity and diversity. We select these principles, not because we're arbitrary, but because the best evidence tells us they work.

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, May 18, 2012.

As david Wiley reports Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is facing bankruptcy "as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding." And he asks, "Why are we surprised this bankruptcy is happening? Anyone who’ s been paying attention isn’ t. The shake up in educational publishing we’ ve long anticipated is beginning… and students will be the benefactors." Of course, one bankruptcy isn't a trend. But my thinking is with Wiley's. It's the beginning of the end for these guys.

Joe Brockmeier, ReadWriteCloud, May 18, 2012.

I have been thinking of setting up a hosted version of gRSShopper but things like storage pose daunting challenges once you get into large numbers of sites. A solution like this, though, points to an innovative way of solving the problem. One one site, you provide access to the software - WordPress, an LMS, gRSShoppper, whatever. And the actual storage is  handled by a service - like Amazon's AWS - which specializes in that. Of course, for my money, speed remains a major concern - AWS isn't exactly fast. But that, with time, will change.

Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, May 18, 2012.

One of the (few) really neat things about OpenPublish on Drupal is the image system. Here, you upload an image once, and the system creates several versions of the image, which can be used by a device-aware system (which OpenPublish isn't) to put small images on small screens and bigger images on the large screens. As Webmonkey says, "web authors use a variety of hacks to (incompletely) work around this problem, but to really solve it the web likely needs new tools." Using HTML, for example, that will read information from the head of the document to serve the right image.

Grace Wyler, Business Insider, May 18, 2012.

Normally people with these sorts of views would never be allowed near a TED stage. But a millionaire slipped through the cracks and as the National Journal reports, TED's Chris Anderson is refusing to publish a talk given on its stage by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. As Time reports, Anderson's explanation is that the talk was “ too political” to be posted during an election year, and that "a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted" by some of Hanauer’ s arguments. Alas for Anderson, the video has surfaced at YouTube, so the rich will be insulted no matter what. Anyhow, you can read Hanauer's radical arguments on that beacon of socialism, Bloomberg. Or read the full text of the talk here. Meanwhile, you can read the discussion at TED where members are shocked - shocked! - to discover that TED wasn't the open marketplace of ideas they thought. People who read me know I have been critical of this aspect of TED for a long time. Maybe now, a few more eyes will be opened.

Dan Hon, Flickr, May 18, 2012.

OK, this doesn't exist, but it is imaginable that we could read something like this in the near future: "Klout is trialling a beta program with the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to provide fast-track entrepreneur visa entry to individuals with high Klout scores in specific areas." Now - I know the first reaction is to say how bad this is. But is it unreasonable for government to have as much information on you as some company? Is it unreasonable for us to use it in some practical way, like crossing borders? And maybe - just maybe - if it becomes used in this way, maybe we'll have some rights to access it, use it ourselves, and ensure it is correct. Because right now none of that is the case.

Kim Zetter, Ars Technica, May 18, 2012.

Via Metafilter: "In a surprising letter (PDF) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’ s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights." It really is time that governments (or at least those that defend civil liberties) were clear on the rights of citizens to make digital media, to store digital media, and to share digital media, without unreasonable interference from the state (or for that matter those individuals who don't want to be seen, discussed or filmed doing things they should not be doing in public).

Harold Jarche, Weblog, May 18, 2012.

The  Automattic (WordPress) company creed is funny - it starts out really strong, weakens through the middle, and by the end relies on a tired old cliché as though the author ran out od ideas even as he or she was typing it out. Also on the same page, some strong words from Lawrence Lessig: "We’ ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists."

Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, May 18, 2012.

I somehow lost the first version of this eBook (and I think I might never have actually posted it online) but as all the individual papers will exist it was pretty easy to recreate in more or less its original form. Hence, reposted (possibly for the first time) an eBook containing the papers and talks leading to the development of the concept of learning networks in 2004. It's the latest addition to my eBooks page (and I'm in the final stages of a preparing a major new eBook for release possibly next week).

Margaret Andrews, Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2012.

If you're watching closely, what you're seeing is a concerted attack on the traditional university model, from thinly disguised advocacy journalism calling on the government to end student support to overt proposals for the dismantling of higher education.

Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, May 17, 2012.

The Change MOOC has come to an end, but if you need your weekly MOOC experience you may want to check out #fslt12 which has just started. "We have set up an Arrivals Lounge  where people can introduce themselves. And there is also a Course Questions forum, where we will try to answer any queries as soon as we can... in  the  Week 0 (Supporting Learning) area of Moodle  (which is this run up week to the course), George has posted a great question to get us warmed up – 'What is Learning for you?'"

Lee D. Ballantyne, leelearning, May 17, 2012.

"I finally finished my research study," writes Lee D. Ballantyne. "This is a summary of the outcomes: a framework for e-portfolio implementation. Full pdf paper here. The result is a good 52-page study of the subject. "Fundamental to these ideas of digital identity and a personal learning environment is the ability to create a personalised space. The benefits of personalisation are twofold. Firstly, a guiding principle behind reflective e-portfolio development – learner control – should apply to the tools learners use as well as to the content. The ability to customise the e-portfolio (process), to integrate the learner' own choice of tools (tools or systems), and, ultimately, create a digital identity (product) is incredibly important to learners. Secondly, personalisation allows learners to take responsibility for their own learning: developing metacognitive skills and promoting autonomy."

Linda Rening, e-Learning Leadership Blog , May 17, 2012.

I supposed I should say something about the irony of a 960 word column expressing the proposition that nobody reads online, especially as I read through to the end of it (to make sure there wasn't some trick ending that would prove I hadn't read the piece - there wasn't). But the point is well-taken: "You read what you are interested in and, further, only when you are interested in it." That's why a search feature for a site like this is at least as importance as brevity, and they're both more important than adding that extra hundred words that simply must be added.

Tom Sachs, YouTube, May 16, 2012.

This short video, a tribute to plywood, is getting rave reviews. It's an educational video, but one that leaves one viewer "weeping in the building materials aisle at Home Depot." Me, I've spent a lot of time with plywood, and so I get that.

Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, May 16, 2012.

Microsoft recently introduced online research support in its office suite and Google has announced a similar service in its 'Research Sidebar'. This post from Google Operating System (not an official Google weblog) covers the basics. "The sidebar includes the top Google search results, image search results, facts, maps, reviews and famous quotes. Click the icon from the search box to restrict the results to images and quotes." My question is, do we really want pages and pages of 'hotel deals' listings in the sidebar of our Google documents?

Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web Document, May 16, 2012.

Clayton R. Wright has once again gifted the community with his massive listing of conferences. It can be downloaded here as an MS Word document. He writes, "The 27th version of the conference list provides over 1,000 events that may be of interest to educators. The  rationale and format of the list is described (here). Readers are encouraged to cut and paste a  selection of events for their colleagues. Through this process, they  may discover professional development opportunities that may help them create a better educational environment for their learners. For example, the list  comprises conferences such as  "Using the Cloud for eLearning", "The World Open Educational Resources Congress",  "Wikis and Open Collaboration", "Open Education", "Improving University Teaching", and "mLearning".  Those seeking to improve the development and delivery of e-learning courses may find a few of the suggestions in this publication helpful. And,  educators working in developing countries who  seek to use open educational resources may want to refer (here). 

Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic, May 16, 2012.

Good story about T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. The idea here is to engage students by having them create a fabricated hostory and attempt to fool a community with it. Their first attempt succeeded in planting a false Wikipedia article. But their efforts from the current year, including one that was undone on Reddit in a mere matter of minutes. What's really inteersting about the article is the anaysis of why Wikipedia was fooled and Reddit wasn't. "One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content." As Wikipedia editors gain more authority and nfluence, as they have over the last few years, the ability of the site to detect errors and falsehoods actually decreases. Of course - this Atlantic article may also be a deception. Who's to know?

Elaine Raybourn, ADL Newsletter, May 16, 2012.

Elaine Raybourn discusses early efforts to create a system that would place people in proximity according to their interests and activities. But in the development of such a system in ADL's Personal Assistant for Learning (PAL) she notes that such a system needs to be culturally aware and act as a mediating agent, 'introducing' people based on context (you may be interested in the U.S. procurement request for research on what are essentially personal learning environments). This would come in the form of "feedback from our interactions in virtual, digital, computer-mediated, or electronic settings." These are based on "footprints" left as we navotage the electronic environment and which are interpreted as subtle cues created and detected by cultrally aware interactive avatars.

Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, May 15, 2012.

When we tried it our unkeynote was less than a success. But to judge from comments after the event, says Michael Feldstein, his effort at an unkeynote went reasonable well. So what worked? "The point of an unkeynote should be to prime the conversational pump," he writes. But how? He considers some of the creativity exercises in Julia Cameron’ s book The Artist’ s Way. The idea is to have yourself (or your audience) create something, anything - a collage from a magazine, or a solution (written down) to a problem. Whatever. (Contrast with what we did: we asked people to begin by speaking out loud in front of an audience.) "So," he writes, "I gave a talk that didn’ t demand immediate group participation, but it was all questions." Me, I think a keynote composed of questions is still a keynote, not an 'unkeynote'. But I think he maybe made the right call in getting up there and delivering a talk, rather than turning it over to the audience, even in an unconference. But you know, I like the collage idea...

Doug Peterson, doug -- off the record, May 15, 2012.

"It always seems to me," says Doug Peterson, "that the 'perfect' piece of clipart is so elusive!" So the Open Clipart Gallery is probably not going to solve all your image issues, but based on the review here it looks like it would be a good addition to the Flickr Creative Commons search and (if you have the money) commercial image DVDs you may have purchased.