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Thursday, December 21, 2006 |
Infinite Thinking JoyRide. Hey, when THE Vint Cerf -- who Google delightfully gobbled up this past year in a fairly significant tech-mastermind grab -- sparks School 2.0 vlogging [aka "video blogging"]conversations along with some truly dynamic edu-bloggers, I'm gonna pull up my virtual Laz-y-Boy recliner and pay attention. Thanks to my 'why did it take me so long???' (re)discovery of the Infinite Thinking Machine blog/vblog just today via some emails with one of ITM's contributors Lucy Gray, I've finally had a chance to enjoy watching a few episodes of "Cerf's Up" a couple of times -- one on mapping, one on writing, and one on design -- and I'm definitely hooked on this dynamite 'future of learning' collection. Also, Chris Walsh's hosted vlogging show is a must-see. You might want to start with "Welcome to the Blogosphere" where Chris walks you through a playful video of what this wacky blogging thing is...and precisely how it's being turbo-used by really creati think:lab, December 21, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
10:19:25 AM  Google It!.
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YouTube, Politics, and Science. Dr. Carol Gilligan's response to televangelist James Dobson's misuse and distortion of her research is important in itself. But even more important is the general availability of this new medium to educators and scientists who can now quickly take steps to correct popular misunderstandings and media distortions. Scientists and educators can use the new free video sharing sites (such as YouTube, MySpace, and YahooVideo) to correct errors that appear in both the old and the new media and they can do the corrections much faster on the web than would be available to them if they were to wait for retraction statements or counter acticles/reports to appear in print, on network television, or in other standard media outlets. ______JH
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[Open Access News]--Peter Suber
YouTube videos enter scholarly debate.
When you really want to reach a wide audience, OA is the solution. But when an OA article in a journal or repository isn't enough, how about an OA video on YouTube?
When Evangelical preacher James Dobson used the scholarship of NYU psychologist Carol Gilligan to argue that same-sex couples should not raise children, Gilligan made a YouTube video to assert that Dobson had distorted and misrepresented her research.
For background, see Paul Thacker, Fighting a Distortion of Research, Inside Higher Ed, December 19, 2006. Don't miss the comments at the end of the article. [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
10:12:59 AM Google It!.
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Podcasting of Educational Materials. Ray Schroeder's Online Learning Update posting about the popularity of a history professor's lectures on iTunes points to another extremely important use of the new web media: the free availability of lectures and other course materials via podcasting through iTunes and other popular music/audio/video services. Lectures used to become available, if they became available at all through packaged audio books and more recently through packaged dvds or course lectures. However those outlets are slow and expensive for most users, podcasts make materials available quickly and cheaply to many more potential learners. ____JH
His lectures get a 5-star iTunes rating - Aileen Jacobson, Newsday
On the verdant 55-acre campus of the private Stony Brook School, Lars Brownworth is a history teacher with dozens of students. In the vast cyberworld of the Internet, Brownworth is a history teacher, too, with tens of thousands of devoted listeners. Brownworth's very specialized podcast series, "12 Byzantine Rulers" - 12 lectures so far, and he's only on the 8th emperor - is a big hit, with a 5 (out of 5) star rating from listeners at iTunes, where his lectures often top the Higher Educational list as most popular. (The podcast has more than 175,000 downloads per month, according to Brownworth's brother, Anders.) Wired magazine wrote that Brownworth exhibits "an infectious passion for his subject."
[ EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] BL comment: This is one viable vision of the future of higher education in that the content packages are small and easily accessed. As always reputation matters and finding "appropriate" educational materials for meaningful learning sequences that generalize to future situations will be a challenge of both educational marketing and personal decision-making. Aggregating the bits and pieces of content competency for certificates and degrees will make assessment of prior learning a viable enterprise. I believe that most of the burden/opportunity will be delegated to the future student to keep a valid ePortfolio of their work and accomplishments. This vision of the future is of many learnings loosely coupled but reflectively made meaningful by the individual students. The severe challenge of this "individualist" vision is how to enlarge the ePortfolio model to accommodate group learning experiences (with due respect for both privacy and intellectual property of others). -- BL
10:11:32 AM Google It!.
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A tale of corporate atrocity.I had lunch with Marc Canter yesterday, and he told me about a conversation he had with Tim O'Reilly and Cory Doctorow, where they told him they knew I had nothing to do with RSS. I asked how they said they knew. They had apparently asked some people at Netscape and they said they didn't work with me. As if that was how RSS came to be the powerhouse it is today. It isn't. Eventually Tim came around, and gave me credit for making RSS happen. Thanks.
The process whereby RSS came to be so powerful was one of building out both ends of the technology, supply and demand, and putting some currency on the network, and hoping it boots up. In the case of RSS as a transport for blog posts and news articles, it did, and the two pieces were Radio UserLand's blogging tool, Radio UserLand's aggregator, and a few early blogs, including Scripting News (the currency). It also worked in a similar manner, eventually, for podcasting.
Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they're eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS. [Scripting News]
9:48:02 AM Google It!.
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Report Says Patents Prevent New Drugs. An anonymous reader writes "Current orthodoxy claims patents encourage innovation, by allowing developers to enjoy profitable monopolies on their inventions which in turn inspire them to create new inventions. A new report by the non-partisan General Accounting Office suggests that this orthodoxy is wrong [~] at least when drug companies are involved. According to the report, existing patent law allows drug companies to patent, and make substantial profits off of, "new" drugs which differ little from existing medicines. Given high profit margins on very minor innovations, the report argues that drug companies have little incentive to produce innovative new drugs. In other words, current patent law actually discourages drug companies from producing new medicines. Responding to the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a strongly worded statement suggesting that a legislative response will be forthcoming. "The findings in this new GAO report," said Senator Durbin, "raise serious questions about the pharmaceutical industry claims that there is a connection between new drug development and the soaring price of drugs already on the market. Most troubling is the notion that pharmaceutical industry profits are coming at the expense of consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer new drugs.""[Slashdot] innovation for big corp is not new "things" but new creative marketing and packaging and look-alike products and given the currrent patent life it also means holding back the deployment of new things until the market has been milked for maximum profit. Reducing the patent term to 5 years from 20 would go a long way to bringing "generic" progress to the public and prevent needless death and suffering. -- BL
9:40:49 AM Google It!.
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The Google Phone?. VE3OGG writes "There has been ample hype over the last several years that Apple's iPhone was just around the corner. (Though a product named iPhone was just recently released by Cisco / Linksys.) Well, while Apple fans continue to salivate at the thought of a phone powered by the company-of-cool, the index-everything-while-doing-no-evil company may be setting itself up to produce their own Google phone in partnership with Orange."[Slashdot] the pace of change is visibly increasing and this will grease the wheels of change -- BL
9:32:58 AM Google It!.
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MultiSwitch, the First USB Sharing Hub. Iddo Genuth writes "A new extension to USB that will enable sharing of various USB peripherals between computers will be available early in 2007. The new MultiSwitch hub technology, developed by SMSC, allows the sharing of information and content from devices such as DVD players, cameras, printers, and scanners, and between laptops and desktops using a simple USB cable. Future hubs may also allow wireless sharing of peripherals."[Slashdot]
9:26:47 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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