Flattering?

Maybe being copied is a form of flattery, but it gets a bit weird when someone copies your complete blog, as this person has done to mine…

I wondered a bit about even mentioning this, as it may just get him more traffic, but then again, exposing the copy may help? BTW, he seems to have trouble catching up with my posts, so seems like this is not even an automated thing? Wonder if this post will get copied to…

Have others experienced the same? How did you react when that happened?

(Thanks, Xavier, for letting me know!)

Standards for Technology Enhanced Learning

I am working on a paper about the role of technical standards for Technology Enhanced Learning…

As another experiment in open research, here are my current thoughts

1. The main issue is no longer that we do not have sufficient standards. Rather, we have maybe too many and, more importantly, we don’t make use of them in very advanced ways… Tools are lacking or too much let the standard shine through, rather than focusing on the user experience.
2. We should avoid continuing the ‘not invented here’ approach that  has made us develop learning specific standards when there may be quite appropriate standards already out there or being developed.
3. Standards should not be research oriented but rely on proven practice. Of course, standards enable deployment at large scale, and  therefor make it possible to do research on global infrastructures.
4. Standards enable openness, and that enables innovation – that is another way for standards to be relevant to research.

I would LOVE your feedback, comments, questions, examples… You can comment here, or email me or twitter me…

Vegas Snowflakes

Seems like the Snowflake Session at the eLearn conference went well.

Was Great Fun to have Wayne come in over Skype and do a Pecha Kucha on Snowflake:

(Hope to post the session in the coming days as a TWIST podcast…)

Even though we did take a bit more time than anticipated with the formal presentations, I am quite proud that we actually did manage to devote half of the session to questions, comments and feedback.

That interactive part of the session and the many conversations afterwards certainly validate that many recognize the theme of mass hyper-individualization: DO let me know if you encounter any examples of your own, or if you have questions or other feedback!

And, of course, MANY thanks to all of you who participated in the session. REALLY – very much appreciated!

Eigenvalue

Passed on by the very talented Mo: a video clip about the Eigenfactor team and how they try to track the flow of ideas… Science is about connections – indeed – and we need better ways to understand and navigate these connections.

Eigenfactor applies more of a google like approach, rather than just measuring citations locally and adjusts for differences in disciplines. I don’t know whether this is the appropriate way to do this, but I sure like the direction this is taking.

I like the visual presentations, but would really appreciate a more obvious way to navigate the data, focusing on particular papers and authors and topics in a science2.0 kind of way.

Anyways, thanks, Mo!

With a little help from my friends…

Twitter is more and more where I turn for help… Last Friday, I did a session with my students on mash-ups.

With a little help from my friends...

I asked for some help on twitter, and got both some validation of my thoughts so far as well as some additional pointers. Was interesting too see how the recommendations went from a bit too basic for my students (still, thanks Christina!), over right on (impressive example, Marcia!), to too advanced and researchy (but a good pointer for those interested, Jo!), with a more philosophically oriented one to make the picture complete (from whom else than My Great Friend Wayne).

It wasn’t just the recommendations (though they were certainly useful), there was also the added benefit of a quick validation that I hadn’t overlooked anything. This kind of quick, just-in-time collaboration is extremely effective and efficient, it seems to me…

Indeed, “I get by with a little help from my friends“… You should try it too sometimes

And, of course, you can use the slides for yourself if your interested…

Snowflakes on Technation

See – this is happening more often to me:

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear...

Pierre tweets from Educause that

Moira Gunn is o.a. bekend van http://www.technation.com/

I subscribe to technation and listen to two episodes in the car. Steven Baker talks about the numerati in the first and explains how he got interested in the topic of data trails when he learned about how IBM is snowflaking its project teams - a topic we also discussed in the last episode of TWIST, to be published over the weekend. In the second episode, Moira Gunn talks with Jeff Howe about ”Crowdsourcing“, and discusses some of the technologies that enable the Snowflake Effect.

Snowflakes everywhere… Am I suffering from the “for a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome?

Incidentally, twitter is the place where I get such serendipitous recommendations these days. How about you?

And by the way, is there a way to figure out what podcasts people listen to? Along the lines of what wakcopa does for the applications you use? I like the idea of being able to see what applications my ‘friends’ use. How about seeing what podcasts they subscribe to? Is there a site that allows me to ’see’ that?