Why comments are disabled on this Weblog.

Last year my weblog began to be hit by comment spam, and Radio offers no simple way to block or delete these nuisances. With regret, I turned off comments.

I have opened a TypePad weblog (where I can do something about comment spam) and am in the process of shifting the Radio weblog(s) to "link blog" format. The TypePad weblogs will pick up the conversational format, including comments. I think the shift will be done by summer's end, or as soon after that as possible.

Thanks for understanding!

Bill Brandon

11:00:06 PM    

Collaboration Technologies.

The Future of Collaboration Technologies At CTC2005. Collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact, and key elements of successful implementations will have both presence - to allow communities of people to interact with "one click"- and persistence - which will enable a memory or continuity of...... [Online Collaboration :: Robin Good's Latest News]

1:05:38 PM    

Social Learning (see previous post also).

This relates to my previous post here. I don't have a problem with social learning, in fact I wish more designers used it as a model. But be careful, the learners still need to know how to evaluate, experiment, and apply what they learn.

Learn Together, Grade Individually. [T]he first Dave ... spoke briefly about how Web 2.0 is changing his kids' education and learning habits. Basically, they are practicing social knowledge acquisition, sharing answers and ideas over IM, yet getting graded primarily by how much they can regurgitate as individuals. We're ignoring the social side of what the Internet is doing. Kids, he said, know the way to be smart is to have smart friends, kind of that "know-where" learning idea of George Siemens that I've written about here before.

But here's what I'm struggling with, and to be honest, I'm not sure why it's sticking in my brain to the extent it is. There is, I'm feeling, some shift here that we're going to have to work through regarding our expectations of originality, some redefinition of plagiarism or what our expectations are. If knowledge gets constructed socially, if we and our students are learning by remixing (and yes, I listened to Lessig on the way up as well,) then I guess the question is do our teacherly ideas about original ideas have to be rethought?

The other interesting idea in the Open Source show was when Weinberger talked about how even our conception of a document has to change, how for hundreds of years we've thought of a report or a story as a container of information. But now, with hypertext, a document's value comes not so much from what it holds but from where it points out of itself to others. I think the reality is that we're going to have to start teaching students to give research back to us in a web-ified form, complete with links. In five years when we've moved beyond paper, hypertext writing (read "blogging") is going to be a basic literacy. The final mile will be to publish all of that writing in a public blog/portfolio space. Then we'll be cranking... [Weblogg-ed News]

11:26:46 AM    

Search Engines and learning.

In the last year, I have heard at least one well-known "expert" on e-Learning state (during a presentation to managers) that "Google is the most widely-used e-Learning application in the world." And I've heard similar sentiments from other experts, educators, and people who really ought to know better.  Statements of this sort are just irresponsible. Here's a study that makes my point.

A search engine brings the user information. That's all. It isn't learning, it's information. What people learn from or do with that information is up in the air, especially if they don't know how to evaluate the information. For a couple thousand years, educated people thought that a one pound weight fell more slowly than a ten-pound weight just because they read somewhere that it was so. Until Galileo trotted up the bell tower in Pisa and dropped a few weights, evidently nobody thought to check out what the Greek philosophers taught. Information retrieved from the internet by search engines is no more reliable than what is written in books or told on the street corner.

If your learners don't evaluate what they find on the Internet, if they can't even separate the product pitches and the press releases from the research results and the facts, don't be surprised if they "learn" some things that you hadn't intended, and expect that much of what they learn may be downright wrong. Learning requires inquiry, experiment, interaction, reflection -- please don't reduce the process to the inquiry step alone via search engine. It would be tragic if all we do with e-Learning is produce what I indelicately refer to as "high-tech dumbasses."

Study: Most Searchers Can't Tell Search Results from Ads, Use Search to Shop. More than half of internet users - 56 percent - do not know the difference between natural search engine results and paid search listings, and 51 percent of online U.S. adults use search for...

[summary] [MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing]

11:21:12 AM    

Design Case Study: East Carolina Chemistry Laboratory Preparation.

East Carolina Chemistry Laboratory Preparation - Dorothy Howse Clayton, Laurie Godwin, Chia Li, Joyce Joines Newman, Syllabus. The creation of an online Chemistry laboratory preparation Web site at East Carolina University was a collaborative project between faculty members in the Chemistry Department, the Harriot College of Arts and Sciences’ Instructional Technology Consultant, [Online Learning Update]

10:40:06 AM