CCK0809

New technologies are changing the way we engage communities, run companies, deliver public services, participate in government and campaign for change.

Registration is open for free MirandaMod : Communities of practice; do they have a role in education?

Registration is open for free MirandaMod : Communities of practice; do they have a role in education? People can attend virtually using FlashMeeting - sign up for the Wiki. The FlashMeeting will be highly interactive as we will be using it slightly differently to the usual format

Fairly comprehensive outline with lots of video interviews with pioneer educators, students and developers working in Open Sim

Interview with Carol Rainbow @carolrainbow in Second Life on Learn 4 Life Island about ICT CPD in Second Life

An open Facebook group for participants in the 2009 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge online course.

Educators should give the act of online reading equal importance. Why not? If teachers want students to "slow read" digital texts, then shouldn't we employ some of the same reading methodologies that work with physical books and printed words? Should we just say, "Forget it, our students are just going to read online material in the same manner that they read chat scripts and text messages?" Explicit teaching is the answer IMHO. Explicitly teaching the act of online reading using tools that support effective, proven techniques.

Should connectivism be included in that matrix?

Very interesting discussion about how Google Wave will change everything by DavePollard

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud.

I saw this come through the other day. I've added the WP plugin to my blog but haven't managed to see a demonstration of RSSCloud in action yet. Dave Winer's aggregator seems to be the only one that supports it currently.

Thought-provoking - thanks, Mike

In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age-today's heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today's policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation.

Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

Are you using this? I created an account with Identi.ca a while back (one of the main platforms that runs on Laconica), but I haven't been back lately because that particular community is very technically oriented (open source people, coders, etc). Certainly don't have anything against open source types (as if!), but prefer an educational bent to it.

Digress.it is a plugin for WordPress that supports discussion at a far finer level than is traditionally available on most blogs. Rather than limiting conversations to a single field at the bottom of a post, digress.it "lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text." -- Mike Bogle, TechTicker

I'm continually looking for a way to use this but so far haven't found one. For personal blogs with fairly short posts it's a bit of overkill I think, but I could easily see it used for longer pieces - especially where you're meticulously analysing or interpreting things.