Posts from — July 2006

well i’m in the process of moving to nyc. today i drove just under 7 hours in a 15 foot moving van… honestly, it wasn’t that bad… though the van isn’t as fast as my truck and there were some slow sections of road. i’ve arrived in hershey for the night and i’ll finish the journey tomorrow, weee! hottest day of the year to unload the truck….

Futurelab – Research – Publications – opening education:
This series of publications aims to open up areas for debate – to provoke and stimulate new visions for education – as well as literally ‘opening up’ education, not only bringing together ideas from educational practice and research but also drawing on the fields of creative arts, media and technical innovation. In the ideas we present we also hope to ‘open up’ the walls of the educational institution – to present models of learning that show how we can create connections between learners in different settings, how we can enable collaboration between different organisations and institutions, how we can make links between different approaches to and forms of learning.

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Future lab has two papers that are worth reading. one on open source and education and one on social software and learning. Of course… the production of these papers seems more ‘brochure’ than ‘research’ at first, but there are some ideas in there that are worth considering.

India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register :

issed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”

Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.

Banerjee told the Hindu: “We do not think that the idea of Prof Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this.”

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first healthcare, then primary education, then secondary education, then computers in secondary education, then perhaps one laptop per child… if and only if, you manage to show some benefit of computers in secondary education that implies that the sole purpose of one-laptop-per-child is colonialism via technical means, by which i mean… making people dependent on foreign capital for jobs and equipment.

I’ll take a million please:

The $100 laptop, aka the One Laptop Per Child project just got its first major order – 1 million for Nigeria.

I would love to own one, if its internals were swapped with a MacBook. These things will be a serious nerd fetish item when they become available, and a serious nerd retro-fetish item in 20 years. –MM

Originally posted by Cameron Sinclair from WorldChanging: To Understand and Protect Our Home Planet, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:01 PM

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interesting. i wonder how this will actually work, we’ll see. i don’t believe that the 100 laptop will change anything on a national level other than revealing a huge hidden set of costs for the program, but i could be wrong.

Fortnightly Mailing: Personal Learning Environments make a step forward. Guest Contribution from Mark van Harmelen.:
The UK is increasingly focusing on the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) after a slow start that began with client systems such as Colloquia (2000) and the Manchester PLE/VLE Framework (2004). This week saw a two-day meeting (on 6 and 7 June) organised by CETIS and held in Manchester. The meeting comprised an initial ‘experts’ only day, and a second public day.

What became apparent at the workshop is that the name PLE now encompasses two major flavours of architecture:

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Personal Learning Environments? I think they are a wave of the present. Every person is actually a learning ecology, their environmental ecology, their social ecology and their mental ecology all rely on the processes of learning through the life of the individual in question. so perhaps a better word would be individualized learning environments….

Beacon Journal | 07/24/2006 | Israeli court backs continued holding of UA geography professor:
An Israeli court on Sunday decided to continue to hold a University of Akron professor, at least until Thursday.
That’s when Ghazi Falah, 53, will be able to see his attorney for the first time.
By then, he will have been in custody for 21 days, the limit detainees in national security cases can be held in Israel without legal representation.
The geography professor from Wadsworth was taking photographs near the Lebanese border when he was taken into custody by authorities and taken to a Haifa jail.

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He is widely known to be an avid photographer and he uses the photos in his classes. Keep in mind, he was arrested before the current war started….

HOTSOUP.com:
HOTSOUP will create a new community of influence among those in government, politics, business and entertainment who make the decisions and those who want to impact them. It will bring the inside world out and the outside world in, and create a richer dialogue and stronger connections among all of these Opinion Drivers.

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This could be interesting…. but until you get people projecting opinions into traditional media… I think you’ll still have major issues with the conservative setting the agenda. They have the pulpits, they have their own media leaders, and they use tactics like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

NECC 2006 Attendees | Program – Webcasting:
We are pleased to announce that several of this year’s Keynote, Spotlight, and Concurrent Sessions will be archived for video-on-demand viewing through a partnership with KZO Webcasting. In addition, we’re providing a number of live interviews with Ed Tech leaders that will also be archived for video-on-demand.

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Webcasts from NECC

Introducing MediaCommons:

(cross-posted from if:book)

I’ve got the somewhat daunting pleasure of introducing the readers of if:book to one of the Institute’s projects-in-progress, MediaCommons.

(What follows is long, so I’ve tucked it beneath the fold.)

Continued below the fold…

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This is great stuff, it is sort of like what h-net, the matrix and my projects at the center for digital discourse and culture have been doing in other fields.

TheDenverChannel.com – News – Marshals: Innocent People Placed On ‘Watch List’ To Meet Quota:
You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.
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suspicious person? one a month… this sounds very suspicious too me.