CTLT and Friends

This Powerpoint from the Keynote at Canada Moodlemoot 2009 has two references to the Harvesting Gradebook and interest in the comments below the presentation.

The importance of play, construction, collaboration, ill-structured knowledge, especially in the global era.

This is the packet for AAC&U. Comments welcome, changes hard to implement at this late hour.

Materials for the AAC&U Conf April 2-4, 2009. The last link is to a new Theron-inspired JamyeJ graphic.

"Google has made a fortune by understanding what makes people happy when they're looking for advertising and online search, but it still feels it needs to know more. Its latest solution: fund grants so that the best and brightest of the academic world explore the areas it's interested in."

"Google and the WPP Group have teamed up to create a new research program to improve understanding and practices in online marketing, and to better understand the relationship between online and offline media. The Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program expects to support up to 12 awards in the range from $50,000 to $70,000. Awards will be in the form of unrestricted gifts to academic institutions, under the names of the researchers who submitted the proposal. Award recipients will be invited to participate in a meeting highlighting work in this area and will be encouraged to make their results available online and in professional publications."

Joel Spolsky, guru of real-world software development, on social software -- in 2004 (pre-Facebook)! It turns out that non-features can be crucial...

"My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface..."

Jon said "I wrote a post last year exploring the spider-starfish tension between Personal Learning Environments and institutionally run CMSs. This is a fundamental challenge that institutions of higher learning need to resolve. On the one hand, we should promote open, flexible, learner-centric activities and tools that support them. On the other hand, legal, ethical and business constraints prevent us from opening up student information systems, online assessment tools, and online gradebooks. These tools have to be secure and, at least from a data management and integration perspective, proprietary. So what would an open learning network look like if facilitated and orchestrated by an institution? Is it possible to create a hybrid spider-starfish learning environment for faculty and students?"

Some alternatives focus on web content management (Nuxeo), others on collaborative application frameworks (MindTouch).

As Alfresco Software Inc. continues to emerge as the leading provider of open source software enterprise collaboration software, rival open source vendors are stepping up their efforts.

Nils thinks he knows "why" Twitter -- this page focuses on "how" to build and keep a following.

Here is an article discussing the problems we face.

Lobstermen collect data Lobstermen collect eMOLT data by attaching temperature and salinity probes to their lobster traps. The probes measure water temperature and salinity while the traps sit on the bottom. When the traps are brought in, the temperature and salinity data from the probes are downloaded to a computer. eMOLT data is available over the internet This website is a collaborative effort between GoMOOS and eMOLT to bring you environmental data collected by both of these programs. The Internet mapping tool found on this site allows you to see the location of GoMOOS and NOAA buoys and the approximate location of the eMOLT sites. We do not show the exact location of the eMOLT sites in order to keep these lobster trapping sites confidential. Using the map, you can select the data you are interested in and then create a graph to view the data.

April 10: Henry Jenkins post contains a good reading list on media policy and participatory culture.

How would we integrate information about this effort as a resource in alt.wetpaint?

"The basic idea is to bring all four of these classes together in this one space," Mr. Gold said in an interview. Each class will have its own turf on the Web site, and each will concentrate on a different era of the poet's life. Students at NYU and City Tech will focus on Whitman in mid-19th-century New York, those at Mary Washington will examine his Civil War-era experience, and the Rutgers contingent will turn its attention to his sage-of-Camden period. Each group will work with and annotate the relevant edition or editions of Leaves of Grass. Each will have access to the others' work. So will the general public - at least that's the plan. "We really don't know what these interactions will be like," Mr. Gold said. "It's one of the risks of the project but also one of the exciting things about it."

Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter and in the comments from one student...I am one of Cole's "experimental lab rats," and I must say that Cole and his colleague changed the way that I view teaching and learning. That course disrupted my notions of participation, identity, and community, and the changes are for the better. The course was so intellectually stimulating that when the course ended, I experienced a tremendous loss. The loss was so great that I felt myself trying to create Twitter communities in my future classes because I missed that engagement. If you are curious about our course, visit my course blog. https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=655&tag=CI597C&limit=20 From there, you can access other students' blogs and see some of the other conversations that ensued.

You may have heard me say that I fear that WSU might 'sail itself under the water' by not adapting to its changing environment. Here's a short but carefully-reasoned examination of parallels between universities and newspapers, which are doing just that.

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear.

For the first time in its six year history, the international Open Education Conference is moving! After five years at the historic Utah State University campus, this year's conference will be held in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, hosted by the University of British Columbia. The Call for Papers is now available!

If you recognize any of these names, you will expect some gems of thought, some of them challenging, some incomprehensible, many that will stretch and bend you -- and you won't be disappointed. Click on any image, then use the "next" and "previous" links.

WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM? Alun Anderson, Scott Atran, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Simon Baron-Cohen, Samuel Barondes, Gregory Benford, Susan Blackmore, Paul Bloom, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Rodney A. Brooks, Sean Carroll, George Church, M.Csikszentmihalyi, Leda Cosmides, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Keith Devlin, Chris DiBona, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Drew Endy, Brian Eno, Dan Everett, J. Doyne Farmer, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, David Gelernter, Steve Giddings, Daniel Gilbert, Marcelo Gleiser, Alison Gopnik, Joshua Greene, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Judith Rich Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Donald D. Hoffman, Gerald Holton, John Horgan, Nicholas Humphrey, Marcy Kahan, Danny Kahneman, Dean Kamen, Kevin Kelly, Rem Koolhaas, Bart Kosko, Kai Krause, Ray Kurzweil, Lawrence M. Krauss, Janna Levin, Seth Lloyd, Benoit Mandelbrot, Geoffrey Miller, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Morton, David Myers, PZ Myers, Tor Nørretranders, Mark Pagel, Irene Pepperberg, Steven Pinker, Jordan Pollack, Ernst Pöppel, William Poundstone, Eduardo Punset, Martin Rees, Lisa Randall, Matt Ridley, Carlo Rovelli, Rudy Rucker, Doug Rushkoff, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Gino Segre, Michael Shermer, Neil Shubin, George Smoot, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Linda Stone, Leonard Susskind, Nassim Taleb, Timothy Taylor, John Tooby, Max Tegmark, Craig Venter, Alexander Vilenkin, Shing-Tung Yau, Anton Zeilinger

Social Bookmarking on steroids -- not just links, but clips from pages you can put in a box.