Leigh Blackall has a new post wondering whether Wikiversity is in trouble. From the post:

In that discussion Jimmy [Wales] has called on Wikiversity to set up stronger policies for deterring what he sees as “trolls, breaching experiments (experiments designed to test the strength of Wiki policies), and attacks on Wikipedians”.

Philipp Schmidt has a new post listing the winners of Mozilla’s recent Jetpack contest. Jetpack is a framework for building Firefox extensions. From the post:

After 3 months of hacking Jetpacks, debugging code, refining user experiences, and having a good ol’ time with teams from all over the world, the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge is sadly coming to an end. In the same spirit of sharing and collaboration that has made this project so much fun, we couldn’t decide on just one overall winner, and decided three projects should get a special prize.

Michael Feldstein has a new post explaining the Sakai Product Council. From the post:

Convening for the first time at last summer’s Sakai conference, the PC’s function is about 90% coordination and 10% governance. First and foremost, our goal has been to take existing documentation on project standards that came about through previous community efforts, place them in a framework of a project life cycle, work with current project owners to help them apply those standards appropriately to their particular work, and then feed the lessons learned back to the community in the form of better documentation.

Glyn Moody has a new post on how the WikiPremed MCAT sustains itself. From the post:

What’s interesting here is that once again it’s analogue goods that bring in the money, while the digital side does the marketing – a pattern that is emerging in many sectors.

“psmythe” has posted a short overview of open textbooks. From the post:

Despite the successes in closing the traditional digital divide (access to computer hardware), a new digital divide is opening for a small minority, in terms of their ability to access knowledge (Green & Hannon 2007)

This afternoon I am presenting an information session on Lectopia for staff in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW. The session is intended to provide a basic overview of what Lectopia is, address some of the recurring questions that arise with respect to the service, and answer any questions that staff may have.

I’ll be recording the session using Lectopia, and providing the tech gods and goddesses cooperate I’ll post a link to the recording here when it’s available. I’ll also release a version through archive.org under a Creative Commons license.

Session Information & Resources
The majority of the session will be devoted to demonstrating and discussing different aspects of the service, therefore the PowerPoint slides below are fairly minimal.

Video Tutorials
The following is a playlist of 7 video tutorials I prepared prior to moving over to FASS. These cover a variety of topics, many of which relate to the custom Self-Service tool that was developed to enable staff to have greater control over the scheduling of their recordings.

Brandon Muramatsu has posted slides from a recent presentation on automatic lecture transcription.

In this digital age, the world is at our fingertips. It's no wonder then, that an increasing number of today's students are logging online for their schooling. But as this form of education grows, so too does the debate over whether it works.

Second Life is a virtual online world where users can log in and quite literally live a second life. The service is totally free to use, though there are options if you wish to pay money for a subscription that allows you to own more land and have more money in the world. The user’s avatar can be anything, and I do mean anything. Some users choose to look like themselves, and others choose to be an animal or plant. Once you have created this avatar for yourself, you are off and running in the virtual world.

By virtually every measure, electronic learning is experiencing unprecedented growth and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A new analysis and forecast released this month by research firm Ambient Insight bolstered previous research in this area, showing that electronic learning, by dollar volume, reached $27.1 billion in 2009 and predicting this figure will nearly double that by 2014, with academic institutions leading the way.

Gardner Campbell sums up the difficulties inherent in evaluating learning in a web 2.0 environment. "I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals. But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity." What this means, he argues, is that the simple measures used today are not up to the task. "I really, truly do not think that Likert scales or uniform tests or other simplistic measures are up to the task of helping us map or understand this most profound practice we call 'education.'" Gardner Campbell, Gardner Writes, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Assessment, Web 2.0] [Link] [Comment]

A Pearson Foundation white paper argues that:
* "Opportunities to engage with digital media increasingly prevail through the use of mobile devices – and in developing countries access to mobile devices is more commonplace than access to other technologies
* "Developmental milestones are changing as young people's access to mobile and digital technology grows.
* "Digital media positively impacts children's opinion of learning, providing engagement opportunities not always seen with print materials."
As always, I question the emphasis on closed mobile platforms (which, while publishers dreams, are harmful to open discourse - see the post about Apple below). Via Garry Putland.
Jay Blanchard and Terry Moore, Pearson Foundation, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Apple Inc., Books] [Link] [Comment]

Summary of a New Republic article that "discusses the continuity of the scholarly record in a richly allusive text." Dempsey writes, "I sensed three strands. First, the scholarly record is evermore diffused through media and formats, embracing source materials, and presents changes of identification and curation. Second, the licensed journal literature is enclosed behind paywalls, and current developments may extend that fate to the book literature. And third, the relevance of the scholarly record to the wider world and to future generations, and the influence of researchers, is diminished by this lack of access."

Remembering what happened to the first Library of Alexandria, I worry a bit about centralizing the archive (and about anything from the New Republic) but reading the article find a robust propoisal with the public interest firmly in mind. "Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome."

The argument for change from the traditional system of academic publishing is compelling, I think, and has two major threads. First, "If scholars continue to hide away and lock up their knowledge, do they not risk their own irrelevance? An immediately important debate, I think, is to be had over how academics fail to engage with their natural constituency (and former students): journalists, business leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and civil servants." And second, "What if our next 'peasant poet,' as John Clare was known, twitters? What if he writes a blog or shojo manga? What if he publishes via a desktop or vanity publisher? Will his output count as part of legal deposit material? What if there is a masterpiece being filmed in Bollywood? What if one among many Nigerian novelettes, which typically address a young heroine's agonized choice between a village boy and a 'big man,' turns out to be written by a Jane Austen?"

Scholars of the future will be astonished at how few voices out of the collective six billion were ever actually remembered, and will wonder how we could let such a cultural tragedy occur. Lorcan Dempsey, Weblog, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Twitter, Books, Semantic Web, Research, Open Source, Academia, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

The secret iPhone developer's agreement is now public. Here are the conditions Apple imposes on developers:
# Ban on Public Statements [by developers]
# App Store Only [for distribution]
# Ban on Reverse Engineering
# No Tinkering with Any Apple Products
# Kill Your App Any Time [Apple can]
# We (Apple) Never Owe You More than Fifty Dollars
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Apple Inc.] [Link] [Comment]

Terry Freedman has released a free ebook on Web 2.0 projects. The book of a compilation of interesting classroom activities using Web 2.0 technologies submitted by several dozen contributors. It's pretty light and breezy, but the information is well-structured (using a template that identifies things like age ranges, applications used, reactions and outcomes) and the content is clearly and well written throughout. Terry Freedman, Website, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Books, Web 2.0, Project Based Learning] [Link] [Comment]

This social media matrix is pretty handy now and would be really handy with a large number of contributors. It lists organizations by sector, describes the social media innovation, and describes the return on investment. I'd like to see links referring to the case studies or other resources describing the innovation. Harold Jarche, Weblog, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Video, Google] [Link] [Comment]

Good overview and discussion of Portugal's Magellan project. "Portugal has initiated an unprecedented roll out of computers in a device called the Magellan. Magellan is a small computer based on Intel's Classmate – dual boot Linux/Windows XP – that costs each student about 50 Euro (~$65 USD)."

I agree with Siemens's basic focus in thew discussion that follows, but wonder who is this "we" of whom he speaks? For example, he says, "We adopt catch phrases from popular media pundits. What we need is substance – a vision and a means to discover the suitability of that vision." Who is this "we"? Not me, I don't think. I know there's a writing tactic, where you identify with the audience and find points in common. But I'm not going to say "we" when I mean "you" or some specific pundit, popular or otherwise, who needs criticizing. George Siemens, Connectivism, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Connectivism, Project Based Learning, Microsoft] [Link] [Comment]

Inspired by Dough Peterson's My Childhood Community, I have collected some Google Street view images from my old home town. Here is where I grew up, the small town of Metcalfe, Ontario, about a half hour south of Ottawa. I was here from Grade 4 (moving from a suburb of Montreal) to Grade 12 (ages 10-18). This was a lot of fun for me (perfect work for a sick day), and would make a great activity for kids of any age, don't you think? Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 15, 2010 [Tags: Google, Thomson Corporation] [Link] [Comment]

Those that like the minutia of design will really enjoy this list of winners from the CSS Off contest. The contestants were given a design to implement and the entries were judges against a strict set of criteria. So the pages look very similar, but the differences will stand out. These are experts at work and it really is a pleasure to look at the results.
Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks, March 15, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

With online sites that rate college professors, students have a lot more information at their fingertips when they choose their classes. Now, a survey suggests that a possible byproduct of these teacher review sites is grade inflation as students use the information to identify the easiest professors and those most likely to award higher grades. (I question the accuracy of Internet reviews since I think disgruntled students are more likely to submit comments than happy ones)