Posts from — June 2006

Teaching and Developing Online:
Teaching is Dead, Long live learning is a similar iconoclastic statement aimed at the traditions of modernist education. It uses the sociological and economic impact of media technology, in particular the Internet and its strengthening of informal and networked learning, and calls the foreseeable end of the traditional roles of teachers and ultimately the school system. It is in this day and age that the ideas of Ivan Illich become more realistic…
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I think illich is becoming more and more important in our own day. the focus on learning notwithstanding.

Florida weighs in on post-modernism:
(g) The history of the United States, including the

2 period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence,

3 the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its

4 present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights

5 movement to the present. The history of the United States

6 shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the

7 revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth.

8 American history shall be viewed as factual, not as

9 constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and

10 testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation

11 based largely on the universal principles stated in the

12 Declaration of Independence.
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another example of our nations educational system, specifically florida, legislating away the truth of history and historiagraphy in favor of the mythologically true version.

Alex Halavais » The Hyperlinked Society:
Joseph Turow at the Annenberg School for Communication (U. Penn) is organizing a conference called The Hyperlinked Society. He’s managed to invite some really cool people to come and talk, and somehow I managed to get invited too. I grateful for the opportunity to get to talk with these folks.

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i’ll be in philly for this conference/event tomorrow. I think i might do a bit of conference blogging… we’ll see.

How MySpace Works:
From How Stuff Works check out this well-written and simple-language explanation of how MySpace works, including a section on safety issues.  This is a good resource to point parents (and fellow library workers) to when the issue of MySpace comes up.
found through LII’s New This Week, May 18th issue (I know, I’m behind)

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interesting, if a bit simplistic analysis from how stuff works.

roanoke.com – Golf Stories-Bigwigs dedicate River Course:
Virginia Tech president Charles W. Steger couldn’t seem to stop smiling early Monday morning. Ditto for the rest of the school’s bigwigs and heavy-hitter contributors on hand for the formal dedication ceremony of the recently renovated Pete Dye River Course at Virginia Tech.
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ahhh, we have priorities at least.

Line56.com: Wikis, Blogs Won’t Survive:
Mark Harrison, a partner with consultancy Kineo, recently made a presentation on the topic of “E-Learning 2012.” The presentation, made at the E-Networking Event in London, was fairly bold, with Harrison predicting that, “I personally don’t believe wikis and blogs will survive.”
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this line of argument fails. the reasons why blogs and wiki’s will change and transform over time is that humans will find better ways of accomplishing what blogs and wiki’s accomplish.

VloggerCon to happen in Second Life, too:
Thanks to Spin Martin, the video blog conference under the name of vloggercon held in San Francisco at June 10 & 11 will also take place in Second Life.
Location will be the hipcast conference center at the Shalida sim.
And because it will happen I will be there and thus I did some promo for it!
Watch the video
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for the vloggers….

Plagiarism review recommends faculty dismissals , by…:
There can never be a time or reason at an academic institution, such as our Ohio University, when plagiarism can be justified. Equally, there can not be any tolerance of the individuals who participate in this serious misconduct.
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it looks like ohio is having some issues. i’d like to bring up the point though that ‘novelty’ is not the issue. theses and dissertations, properly done, will not be really novel, they will contribute. the problem is when the rest of the contributions that went into the thesis and dissertation are not attributed to their sources.

E-Book Project To Give Free Access To 300,000 Volumes:
Two nonprofits are preparing to provide free access to 300,000 texts online. Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make the e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair’s Web site from July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg’s founding, through Aug. 4.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/14727375.htm
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i’ve been supporting project gutenberg for years. 300k volumes is not a small amount and keep in mind that some of them have computer generated audio-book versions. (i can’t stand the computer voices, but some people might like them)