This Modern World. What the president has learned since 9/11. [Salon.com]

» And I was going to say "nothing at all."  Shame on me!

University to challenge copyright laws - Tech News - CNET.com. Quote: "Duke University's law school has received an anonymous $1 million gift to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law." [Serious Instructional Technology]

» Way to go anonymous donor!!!

I've posted a 2nd draft of the proposed "free for personal use" liveTopics license agreement.  It's modelled philosophically after the BitKeeper license.  Hopefully the text is now clearer.  I'm really looking for comments/criticisms to surface now so that I can get this knocked out soon.

The concept of formative assessment. Boston, Carol.

Quote: "In addition to these classroom techniques, tests and homework can be used formatively if teachers analyze where students are in their learning and provide specific, focused feedback regarding performance and ways to improve it. Black and Wiliam (1998b) make the following recommendations:

• Frequent short tests are better than infrequent long ones.
• New learning should be tested within about a week of first exposure.
• Be mindful of the quality of test items and work with other teachers and outside sources to collect good ones."

[Serious Instructional Technology]

» These all sound like good ideas.  I guess the 2nd one should be "New learning should be tested within about 24hrs of first exposure" if you really want people to score well.

And that in a roundabout way made me question: What is the value of my education.

I have a degree in Computing & Mathematics and yet I can remember practically nothing about the math I learned and I don't remember learning any computing.  I guess I was tested reasonably regularly (at least once a year) and passed them.  But what was the value of all of that?

If I had been heading for a career as a research scientist I could probably answer that question.  For almost any other job my degree syllabus was no more useful than a decent reference book and the ability to learn.

What would be the effect if, instead of teaching knowledge, we tought metaknowledge for 3 years:

• How to learn 101
• Introductory social networking
• Advanced collaboration
• Social capital for beginnings
• Communities 200

and then handed you a copy of Google on your way out the door?

Although Radio includes a Find & Replace facility which lets you search the database I often find it more annoying than useful.  This is because it too much power with too few controls.  Most of the time I want to search for a specific table or script.  But with Radio's built-in find any occurrence of my search term in any object, I also get to iterate through these interactively in little windows that popup in random spots on the desktop, and I'm never quite sure whether that beeps means my search is finished or not.

Tonight I snapped and and wrote a findObject() routine to search the database for object names, and then added a mechanism to allow specifying the object type: table, text, outline and so on. Drop utils.root into your Radio tools folder & restart Radio.  You will have a new menu Utils in which will be a find sub-menu.  It takes the current target as the start point for the search, or the root if you have no start point.  Take a look at utilsSuite.findObject() if you want to see the guts.

Happy searching.

 

 

DanBri. Dan Brickley has written, imho, an excellent posting on the value of RDF with RSS. All those bothered by this,... [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

» Dan Brickley's arguments for RDF (something else I'm not an expert in) sound very cogent but, more than that, they evoke some of the same sensations as I got from reading an earlier piece from McGee's musings about innovation:

"When Hollywood asks us to enumerate the uses we'll lose if it gets its way, we can't. That's innovation for you. If we could predict the future uses of new technology, they wouldn't be innovative. That's innovation. It's the force that drives our civilization. It's the force that drives our culture. It's the force that makes us human ("the tool-using animal"). I'm not willing to give it up, even if I don't know what it is."

Dan writes:

"Just use namespaces" doesn't address the problem of one task, multiplenamespaces: people, events, music, documents, concerts, prices,locations... If we're interested in applying a variety of descriptivevocabularies to a single task, we'll need to use vocabularies developedoutside of RSS-DEV. RDF apps focus on just this, whereas many XML appsfocus on a single monolithic DTD or Schema that captures a specific task.

Dave's rush to cast RSS 2.0 seems more and more premature.  I think it would be much better if he went back to calling it 0.94 and published it.  Then we can get to using it straight away without the hieghtened tension of all the RDF people grinding their teeth (and surely that's a good thing right Dave?)

In the meantime we can all take the necessary time to thrash out the issues about RDF and RSS2.0, maybe even what RSS stands for.  It's obvious that there are a lot of issues and just unilaterally declaring it so isn't going to put them to rest.

DM Review: The Intelligence in E-Mail: Are You Ready to Listen?. Quote: "It is becoming more clear that when one tries to make a CRM system do everything (ERP, data warehousing, e-mail management, billing, telephony, chat, etc.), one gets something that does nothing well. This realization is leading to unification of data, but specialization of channel."

Comment: We're about to embark on a fairly significant e-mail project - giving all classes a listserv - and managing the knowledge generated will be a trick.  I know the impulse will be not to keep archives and to lock them away if created.  Also to make the lists instructor-distribution only. [Serious Instructional Technology]

» A few years ago I was involved in a virtual school project.  Although I would not call it a success per se, it had many successes and we learned a lot.

My reason for dredging this up is that one of our bedrock principles was that email was part of the problem.  At the time there were growing voices suggesting email as the solution to all our woes.  A good example was student submission of coursework.  This struck us as particularly crazy given the problems people were already having managing their email (especially lecturers) and the lack of any solution for managing email.

Here is an example of where this can easily go wrong:

"You failed because you didn't do the coursework"

"But I submitted my coursework in the e-mail"

"No you didn't"

"I did it was attached to the e-mail I sent you"

"There was an attachment but it was empty."

"But the file was in there"

Who is in the right here?  Is this an honest student, victim of a mistake, or someone trying to pull a fast one.

The solution we ended up recommending was based upon Livelink a web-based knowledge (content) management system.  In particular we were interested in whether we could implement workflow to manage a number of the complex problems in this space (the answer was no we could not for reasons more complicated than I want to go into here).

However the approach was right.  It gave us:

• Web based
• Secure
• Workspace based metaphor [in particular the personal workspace which we hoped would address the need to build a student profile]
• Discussion forums with e-mail integration
• News channels
• Full-text searching of everything
• Document management
• Integrated workflow
• Scalable to tens of thousands of users
• Scriptable at the back end (if you were a very patient person)

These kinds of features were what we were looking for to address the concerns of building a virtual learning environment for real. 

Okay long pointless ramble over...

Judge rules PayPal unfair. One for consumer power [The Register]

» Hmmm... just as I was setting up my PayPal account I go and read a lot of stuff that makes me not want these people to have my credit card details.  I don't know how reliable PayPal Sucks and PayPalWarning are but it's enough to put me off.

Karlin Lillington: "What society keeps its citizens under greater, round the clock surveillance than any other? Russia? Indonesia? North Korea? Why no -- it's Great Britain." [Scripting News]

» It's true.  It's also a fact, although not well understood, that the recent RIP act was not a snoopers charter at least not the way people seem to think.  As one Home Office minister admitted the snoopers are already at it and sharing their information with anyone who cared to ask.  RIP was an attempt to legitimize this activity.  As such we should still oppose it (because it is too broad), but we shouldn't forget that the violation of our privacy continues unabated.

Karlin also points to a piece by Simon Davies in the Guardian which is very worrying indeed.

Blunt Force Trauma is Now blog cognosco. Name change: "Blunt Force Trauma" is now "blog cognosco". [blog cognosco v 0.1]

» Awww, I liked Blunt Force Trauma.

Oh well, the king is dead.  Long live the king!