Friday, April 25, 2003

Judge says file-swapping is legal. A federal judge in Los Angeles hands a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast and Grokster, dismissing much of the studios' lawsuits against them. [CNET News. 1:52:45 PM

Judge upholds law requiring ISPs to name downloaders. Critics say ruling is big blow to Internet users' privacy [InfoWorld: Top News] Big issue. How will this affect other publishing concerns and eLearning? 1:39:04 PM

To build a Virtual Learning Environment used for collaboration activities for an ESL course (no LMS based components are used) It will consist of: A Website: Overarching resource using all or some of the following: A Weblog: Teacher created news and announcements, musings, posts of activities and things to do and see on the web. A Wiki: Students can use to build stories and text with meaning??? An online diary system (possibly via a wiki) for student use An RSS News feed? Latest news for generation of topical talking points fed from common newspaper sources A second RSS News feed? For Announcements and items fed from Weblog A Discussion forum: Problems, feedback, Discussion of talking points A Chat room? Brainstorming of ideas Survey (form)? used to gather feedback and evaluation while activities undertaken. Feedback to be presented as part of assignment. Several Mini modules of course content I'm still working on this and in particular the activities but the whole thing which will be assembled using freely available, open for use, components, will have the course content as activity based and it will revolve around students communicating and collaborating to build documents and discussion based on the news items, announcements and other snippets fed to them through the site. This hopefully will help them learn their English. This may prove too challenging for them but they seem to cope with computer tasks pretty well and enjoy them. The rss feeds are used to provide simple content for "collaborative, activity based, dynamic learning" that will change with the whim of the news feed. In this instance the teacher will be in charge of the content and largely responsible for the RSS based content and choosing the appropriate RSS feed for the news items. The students involved tend to lack motivation, they were largely only interested in an earlier resource about online searching because it used pretty colours and graphics and had an interesting activity. They don't enjoy static content, dynamic changing content and activities that continually change may at least be somewhat more interesting... Personally I see huge use for this simple idea of news feeds, wikis and blogs although just like any technology thery each have a place and wont be used by everyone. [Learning Design, Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Activities] 9:13:44 AM