Julian Orr wrote a book called 'Talking About Machines' where he describe the way that photocopier technicians learned their trade. It seems to me that the process as he described it was a complex of similarity heuristics, but combined in a network of other technicians who had particular areas of expertise. Orr was riffing on the work of Lave and Wenger 'Legitimate Peripheral Participation' and John Seely Brown.

Good article with summary list of

I own a licensed copy of Endnote. I had a few years of references built up in Endnote but I was having problems with updates and loosing reference files and the application locking up. Support was terrible. Endnote was clunky bloatware but I used it because it was the best available at the time and I had a lot of references stored. I spent hours just keeping the Endnote application in shape. I learned that I really needed to save my Endnote files on a regular basis other wise I had to do a lot of recreating, more hours of my labour. I saved the files in a non-proprietary format and consider it my stuff I was so pleased when I discovered Zotero. It worked. A couple of times when I had issues getting it set up I contacted the developers and they got right back to me so I have been a big fan ever since. I was able to open my saved reference files in Zotero and concentrate on using my references rather that maintaining an application. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but there are some very good arguments to suggest that this is a frivolous and predatory lawsuit. I hope GMU sticks to it. If TR wants to maintain it's customer base, make a better product.

"We are trying to overcome the distance you feel in distance education by being socially connected," Snoddy said. "You develop socially as well as intellectually in college. This doesn' tmake sense. Do people not complete DE courses because they feel distant? More likely because most of the courses are complete crap and are offered by questionable faculty. It is more likely that the courses selected for special treatment in this article were a step above the usual crap that gets served up as DE and were presented with a little imagination and care.

Podcast of Nora Young interview with Clay Shirky. Intellectual production going to be as profoundly affected by the production of the amateur as the MSM has already been.

Wiki with a bunch of video clips related to teaching and learning with Web 2.0. Engage them don't enrage them.

corporatizing of education, the education/industrial complex

This guy is obviously in the guise of a human being.

Could it be that part of the problem be that the teachers who attempt to teach with "real world" concrete examples have never had any real world concrete experience. 12 years of school followed by 4-5 years of undergrad, now you are a teacher, teach about the real world. hmmm

fantastic experiment not sure if the title of the article is justified in the text. Biggest complaint seems to be loss of control and authority. hmmm "Students having their classroom ideas judged not simply by their peers but by a far wider audience" and that is a bad thing because...?

Just in time scholarship.

See also Clay Shirky"Here Comes Everybody and the concept of Coasean floor.