My good friends at FIT have done it again. As a companion to their smARThistory multimedia blog, they have published a companion web site that maps their vodcasts to the exhibits at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Way cool.
By the way, their blog is up for an Edublog award this year. Am I plugging for them? You bet I am.
Bernie Durfee has been doing some great architectural design work on the LMOS concept, which is now open to the public. It’s mostly technical and aimed at a developer audience; however, Bernie is a very good writer and has done a great job of making the technical issues fairly decipherable even to non-technologists.
Comments on the wiki pages are welcome.
You can now vote for your favorite edublogs. It looks like a bumper clock this year, including many interesting-looking blogs that I haven’t heard of before.
As usual, Jon Udell is onto something interesting. A company called Linden Labs has produced a MMORG called Second Life. Three things make this particular venture somewhat unusual, though. First, they bundle a free development environment, so that people (theoretically even non-programmers) can create their own clothes, bodies, objects, buildings, and so on. Second, it’s not so much a game as it is a virtual market. People own the digital objects they create and can buy and sell them. And finally, they are actively recruiting educators to use their virtual world.
All in all, it’s vaguely reminiscent of JotSpot, in the sense that it’s a consumer-oriented social canvas for creating certain kinds of applications. In the case of Second Life (SL), you can think of it as a simulation wiki.
According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department is looking into the possibility that the Blackboard/WebCT merger might violate antitrust laws. Given that the combined company would own 80-90% of the LMS market, it’s no real surprise. This will be interesting to watch.
(Found via Online Learning Update.)
Rashmi Sinha has an outstanding post analyzing the information-finding affordances of Google Base. For people who are interested in learning some of the basic concepts in modern information architecture (IA), she does a great job of illustrating key ideas. (You may want to fire up another browser window and play around with Google Base while reading her article in order to make it more concrete.) For people who are a little further along in their education, the post has a great analysis of IA trends in general and strong review of Google’s new interface in particular. Here’s one observation that I particularly appreciated:
Finally, what’s most interesting about GoogleBase is that it corroborated what I have believed all along – tags and search don’t replace facets, categories and other information architecture concepts. I can imagine a tag-based, del.icio.us like GoogleBase – input your information and find others’ information serendipitously. But Google wants people be able to find information in a predictable, intuitive manner and for that it has to rely on a combination of categories, facets and tags. It did not reinvent Yahoo’s directoy – instead its an innovative way of using all three. Tags are a brilliant innovation and can do many better things better than other methods. But the rumours of the death of classification, facets etc., have been greatly exaggerated by experts such as Clay Shirky.
She strikes a great balance between appreciating the value of tags and resisting the hype around folksonomies. Tags are great. Categories are great. Facets are great too. They all (should) work together.
Finally, there’s an interesting little throw-away in her piece that caught my attention: Google has only twelve top-level categories at Google Base, and one of them is “course schedules.” What are they planning for the education market?
(Found via elearningpost.)
Ask and ye shall receive.
I recently wondered aloud about the viability of podcasting video for teaching purposes.
Well, I guess others have been wondering as well. Harvard has just announced that they are vPodcasting a computer science course. Frankly, comp sci wouldn’t be my first choice for this sort of experiment because (a) I don’t see any special pedagogical utility in offering it via video and (b) I don’t see any pedagogical utility to making the video portable. That said, if you’re already offering a course via video for whatever reason, why not make it portable for the students?
(Found via Online Learning Update.)
