"2008 NMC/Educause Horizon Report Released"

Here's an excerpt:

"The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking— combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship."

More from Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog here.

Earth Hour 2008

One hour of "voluntary darkness" on the 29th of March



Hoping to "see" the difference it would make. 8 pm Manila

Web 2.0 as the handmaiden of Education?

Chris Riedel reports on Chris Dede's, (Timothy E. Wirth professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education) talk at the FETC 2008*. In particular, Riedel notes that:

"This evolution (of education) has created a gap between what (Dede) termed 'Classic learning and knowing' and 'Web 2.0 learning and knowing.' According to Dede, many students feel that what they learn is irrelevant to their 21st-century lives. They also feel that they have powerful ways of learning within their lives that are not respected in the classroom. 'Thinking is now distributed,' he said, 'across minds, tools and media, groups of people, and space and time.' It is important, he shared, for people to be fluent in new technologies and literacies because more and more jobs are disappearing that require classical knowledge. "

More here.

Perhaps it's just me but the resonance of the message is welcome news.

*Florida Educational Technology Conference

Education is ...

... hope. Count me in.

Just connecting to Laurence Yap of Malaysia.

Just sharing an ideablob

Thinking Beyond Social Software, according to Don Tapscott

"The old notion you have to attract, develop, and retain the best and brightest inside your corporate boundaries is becoming null. With costs of collaboration falling precipitously, companies can increasingly source ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent.

The end result is that the corporation may be going through the biggest change in its short history. Now this is beginning to affect education, government and even the nature of the democratic process."

Sounds more like outsourcing doesn't it? But then again, that could be a tricky oversimplification.

[via Loic Le Meur]

5000 Web 2.0 Tools in 333 seconds

How many logos can you identify?



[via Beth Ritter-Guth]

"Facebook Is Passe, a Professor Says"

So reports Hurley Goodall of The Wired Campus on Martin Weller's statement that "this will be the year Facebook fades away for many of us."

That doesn't mean that Social Networking is passe, right? More here.

Quote of the Day

"The question is no longer about whether YouTube and FaceBook are suitable media for your in-house training materials and interactive simulations, but rather what's holding you back?"

John Stokdyk

Read more.

And we're not even talking about Wikis, say to "teach" Economics.

Linear or Networked Learning

Just parking ideas that could have serious implications for education reform.

Ken Caroll shows the "options" in his blog post here.

Echo Chamber Anyone?

"If you like baby names, you will love this"

Steven D. Levitt of Freakonomics fame says:

"It let’s you type in the first letters of a name and see in a flash the rise and fall of such names by decade. The visuals are amazing."

More here. Then I tested the name Gloria. Go ahead. Make your conclusions.

Science of Coffee

Science and the City shares a podcast featuring the Chairman of illycaffe S.p.A. discussing the chemistry and technology behind great tasting coffee. [via Cory Doctorow]

Click on the image below to listen to the mp3 file.



Now for the art of drinking coffee, here's how they do it in Italy.

Is Mososo coming of age?

Seems to be a necessary implication in Paul Lamb's blog entry.

He describes the likely trend:

"At the end of the day, and likely by the end of the year, I bet you an iPhone we will be seeing alot more mobile social networking. The technology and services are getting better and more easy to use. Most importantly, as the shift to everything mobile and local contintues (sic), and as we become more comfortable with our smart devices doing the connecting for us, mobile social networking is likely to boom."

The following could be a suitable tagline:- Mososo: Simple. Smart. Social.

Now to start the New Year

I thought I'd combine Dion Hinchcliffe's 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 and Anne Zelenka's Top 10 Books for Web Workers 2007 to find their intersection at Alex de Carvalho's "Social objects as artefacts for identity management".

Seems like the connect (to objects) part of 2d2c still stands.