EduCause LOVCOP Presentation: What's the Fuss About RSS?. Quote: "Alan, Brian, and myself will be giving a presentation to the EduCause LOVCOP (Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice) on Friday. We'll be talking about some of the work we've done on sharing learning objects using RSS, and what that pattern of resource sharing/distribution could mean to practicing teachers. We'll also be giving an overview of the background that led up to the RSS/LO work, and will talk a bit about future directions and implications."

Comment: I just realized that I'm going to be on the road at that time. Fiddlesticks. Nevertheless, check out the wiki. [Serious Instructional Technology]
10:30:56 PM  #  

CoP blog.

New Blog: COP^2: "Smatterings of thought about communities of practice, instructional technology, virtual communities, technology-based training, collaborative learning environments, e-learning, organizational learning, and performance improvement." Part of a series of research projects funded by Masie Center.

[elearnspace blog]
10:30:10 PM  #  

A proto-language to converse about the process of learning?.

In my paperPersonal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning I speculated that personal Webpublishing could possbibly serve as a proto-language to converse about personal learning processes and collaborative meaning construction. I wrote:

In its rather short history, personal Webpublishing as a practice has already produced an, albeit rather small, vocabulary of its own. Every single day more people get familiar with terms like Weblog, post, permanent link, title, item, category, RSS feed, aggregation, syndication, referrer, time stamp, archive, editor, authoring, topic, trackback, meta-data, comment, outline, and so forth. The dynamic development of the entire field of personal Webpublishing frequently adds new terms and concepts to this emerging mini-language. It might be too early to speculate about the long-term effects of this specialist language on the way we converse about projects of individual and collaborative meaning construction. Nevertheless, I suspect that this growing vocabulary of personal Webpublishing might serve as a proto-language for the conversational construction of a personal language for learning. Its current vocabulary is certainly too limited to model the construction of new meaning but it might provide some conceptual "handles" that could be merged with other existing vocabularies. I am thinking here of Ausubel's (1963) notion of Meaningful Learning, von Glasersfeld's (1995) Radical Constructivist ideas on meaning construction, Piaget's (1972) notion of Perturbation, Assimilation, and Accommodation, Kelly's (1955) Personal Construct Psychology, Harri-Augstein & Thomas' (1991) Learning Conversations framework, Schön's (1987) description of the Reflective Practitioner, and Novak's (1998) Human Constructivism, and other theoretical models of human meaning construction. This issue certainly requires more thought and discussion...

Do you think that this is a notion that merits further thought and discussion? [Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]
10:29:15 PM  #  

The Ethics of De-Publishing. I've been following this for the last few days - Dave Winer discovered that Mark Pilgrim has been harvesting his feed every few minutes. Pilgrim, as it turns out, has been tracking changes Winer makes to his weblog. For good reason - my Edu_RSS aggregator has picked up some really scathing remarks posted by Winer (who is defending his particular vision of RSS), then removed (after which he denies that he has said anything bad). Winer complained about the bandwidth, Pilgrim posted a guide to reducing bandwidth in RSS feeds. Winer started talking about copyright restrictions in RSS feeds (and some of his friends at Harvard Law started raising legal questions, which drew a scathing remark from me - if you don't want people to use your content, don't syndicate it). If it weren't for the people involved, it would all be very petty. The interesting question in all of this is: what are the ethics of de-publishing or editing weblogs? Me, I stand by whatever I've posted, no matter how stupid it seems a few minutes later. I may write a correction afterward, but I'll take my lumps if I deserve them. Should I ever be forced for legal reasons to remove something, a big black box will appear in its place. That's my policy, and I'm sticking to it. By Greg Ritter, Ten Reasons Why, July 11, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:27:52 PM  #