First paragraph – The MOOC Model for Digital Practice responds to the “Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow” section of the consultation paper Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity by synthesizing the current state of knowledge about Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). It argues that building and sustaining prosperity through Canada’s current digital strengths depends on a digital ecosystem that embraces both infrastructure and the collaborative social networks enabled by that infrastructure. Prosperity in this context requires a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to turn these factors towards creating wealth. By exploring the relationship of MOOCs to the digital economy in general and their potential roles to prepare citizens for participation in that digital economy in particular, it illustrates one particularly Canadian model of how these needs may be addressed.
Allison Burrell on 02 Nov 10"Blekko, a new search engine, is trying to provide more relevant search results that are spammer and content-farm free. Described as "Wikipedia meets search", the engine will use human oversight to separate that trusted content from that of spam. They also use the slashtag, /, to limit the results to only those of trusted sites. Blekko has predefined slashtags that you can use, like "/people" for a people search or /blog for a blog search. There are also topics and other categories like /basketball or /android. Since many of these tags are predefined, you might have to create your own slashtag if Blekko does not recognize what you are searching for. As you name your slashtag, you can list keywords and then enter the sites you want Blekko to search. You can share or browse slashtags of other users, too. This engine is heavily based on its users, much like Wikipedia is. Since it is still in beta testing stages, it is very likely that the site will improve sometimes in the near future. This search engine would work well in a classroom. With the safe environments that teachers want to provide with children who are searching the Internet, Blekko would help ensure that they are yielding appropriate results. It would also be a great tool to use with parents at home when browsing the Internet with their children."
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