CTLT and Friends

Don't we start higher education with generally larger classes and work toward smaller ones? I am not sure, how much starting with smaller classes applies to higher ed.. but it's something to think differently about.

Lots of research in higher ed tends to debunk the belief that smaller classes without additional kinds of mediation will have little impact. Many have argued turning the curriculum in higher ed upside down. Small classes in first years, then when students have internalized new learning strategies they are more likely to get more out of the large lecture class and have the schema to contextualize and therefore learn more from the bombardment of facts that are most often lectures.

more fodder for Rain King principles and A of A.

Google engineer David Wang explains how collaborative editing through concurrency control and operational transform work in Google Wave.

Under-the-hood (but very general) description of how Google wave handles concurrent edits.

Not much new in the article, but the comments have an interesting backward-looking quality, referring often to integration of campus systems, and not at all to new ways of learning.

The holy grail of education, at least for software designers, remains a highly addictive game that teaches effectively, at its core.

What it takes to be "World Class", from a World Bank economist

Seems a level-headed and thoughtful look at what might make for successful social networking..

Not education per se, but certainly educational.

I am still waiting for the day when honesty and candour is respected in government and corporate life, comprehensively.

some nice screen shots here

"What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven't changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user's contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that's a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we've come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology."

an interesting post about Google Wave and academic document collaboration

To make sense of it all, we have compiled key information, definitions, and links related to the launch of Google Wave. This in-depth guide provides an overview of Google Wave, discusses the terminology associated with it, details information on Google Wave applications

You can define a robots behavior in the google wave chat... From Mashable: "Robots are the other type of Google Wave extension. Robots are like having another person within a Google Wave conversation, except that they're automated. They're a lot like the old IM bots of the past, although far more robust. Robots can modify information in waves, interact with users, communicate with others waves, and pull information from outside sources. Because it acts like a user, you can define its behavior based on what happens in the chat. You could build one as simple as "change the word dog to the word cat" or one as complex as a fully-functional debugger. We'll probably start seeming some very advanced robots in the near future."

You can define a robots behavior in the google wave chat... hmmm... From Mashable: "Robots are the other type of Google Wave extension. Robots are like having another person within a Google Wave conversation, except that they're automated. They're a lot like the old IM bots of the past, although far more robust. Robots can modify information in waves, interact with users, communicate with others waves, and pull information from outside sources. Because it acts like a user, you can define its behavior based on what happens in the chat. You could build one as simple as "change the word dog to the word cat" or one as complex as a fully-functional debugger. We'll probably start seeming some very advanced robots in the near future."

In spite of all the as-of-yet unexploited benefits of technology, there is quite a lot to be said about physical interactivity..

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