Another of Stephen Downes’ Breaking the Power Law blogs provides a useful comparison of Wink to Qarbon’s Viewletbuilder. The short version: Wink is free but ViewletBuilder is nicer.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Research Pages of Stuart G. Towns: Wink
In one of the blogs from Stephen Downes’ “Breaking the Power Laws” list, Stuart Towns recommends a nifty little tool called Wink. While it definitely falls in the low-end category of the range of software simulation products I outlined in eLearn, it has the great benefit of being free.
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Help Break the Power Law: Downes Leads the Way
In the August 1st edition of OLDaily, Stephen Downes does the e-learning community a great service. (I would have provided a hyperlink to the edition, but the site doesn’t seem to have conventional permalinks and the page hasn’t been rolled over to the persistent site archives yet. Poke around at http://www.downes.ca and you’ll find it pretty easily.) He provides a list of e-learning weblogs that do not yet have inbound links, which gives them very low ratings on Technorati (and probably also means that they don’t show up well on Google searches). These sites tend to get ignored because…well…they have been ignored already, and people tend to gravitate toward sites that have traffic. (As Downes points out, this is known as the Power Law. In addition to the Clay Shirky blog post that he references, Duncan Watts’ book Six Degrees has some good stuff on power laws in it.)
I, for one, intend to scan the list of blogs, subscribe to the RSS feeds of any that look promising, and look for opportunities to link to the worthwhile posts. I encourage all readers with their own weblogs to do the same.
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i d e a n t: Online Discourse: Past, Present and Future
This piece makes some nice points about the pros and cons of blogs, wikis, and discussion boards in terms of their relative affordances for conversation. Plus, like me, he has issues with the threaded model for discussion boards.
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A Thousand and One Affordances: iTunes, KM, and Creative Commons
For several reasons, I have been resisting the temptation to post about Duke’s now-famous decision to give an iPod to every first-year student. To begin with, it’s been covered to death, so I didn’t think that just posting the link was doing a particular service to anyone. Second, others have already written about at least some of the affordances of the iPod that make it a potentially good fit. And third, since I just bought a new one myself, my iPod envy is under control.
But it occurs to me that there is a possible implication that hasn’t been fully explored yet, having to do with the affordances not just of the iPod but of the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). If you think about it, the iPod/iTunes/ITMS system that Apple created is simply an efficient means for distributing any digital content with any well-defined DRM restrictions. ITMS even has its own system for categorizing information (though anybody who has seriously tried to search ITMS by genre knows that their taxonomy has some significant limitations). You could use it to deliver journal articles or learning objects just as easily as songs (as Duke clearly intends to do). You could distribute some content for free and other content for fee (as Duke also clearly intends to do). You could probably even create a channel that passes Creative Commons licensing information and, in some cases, even inforces it. For example, some of the DRM options on PDFs and even Word 2003 documents (e.g., allow copying but not editing, allow or don’t allow cut-and-paste) mirror some CC licensing options. If you hook it into something like Merlot or MLX you could develop a relatively efficient learning object distribution channel, where teachers could post playlists that function something like an enhanced version of Instructional Architect (enhanced because it affords downloading of learning objects for offline use and potentially enforces DRM).
I’m not ready to suggest that this is the way to go; it may be that a P2P model like LionShare is a better option in the long-run. But it’s worth thinking about.
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Full Context: Democratic Primaries as an Informational Cascade
I have been digging more into the subject of informational cascades as I work on editing my submission to eLearn on “emergent learning” (which I’m going to refer to as social learning instead, given the current lack of agreement about what “emergent learning” means). The more I dig, the more excited I get. There’s some deep and important stuff here.
Many of the best insights are buried in heavily mathematical academic papers on efficient market theory; but every once and a while you run across a gem that’s written to a broader audience. As William Dulker points out in his Full Context weblog, Slate’s William Saletan provides a wonderful, easy-to-understand example of an informational cascade in the Democratic primaries.
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National Library of Virtual Manipulatives
The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is a library of free K-12 resources for math teachers. It’s worth checking out if you have an interest in instructional design regardless of the particular subject or level that you teach. There are some very clever ideas for learning objects here. Plus, you gotta give them credit for the name. “Virtual manipulatives”…I love it!