As we watch the spectacle of the jackasses in the mainstream media blithely continue to pretend to know what they’re talking about after being repeatedly and stunning wrong in the predictions of the U.S. Presidential primary, it’s worthwhile to look in the mirror. Stephen Downes has a good report card up for those of us […]
eLearn-Magazine
FAS's Kay Howell on the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act
Federation of American Scientists’ Kay Howell, who authored the research roadmap for the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act, has a column in eLearn explaining why passage of the act is so critical: Today’s students are not only comfortable with technology-they know how to use it effectively to solve problems, find resources, and build networks of […]
e-Learning Usability Engineering Guide is Up
Lisa Neal and I have an in-depth tutorial up on eLearn about how to do usability testing for self-paced e-learning courses (although the methods would work for collaborative courses as well). It was originally written as a stand-alone guide and I’m not sure how well it reads in article format. In any case, you may […]
Learning Objects Considered Harmful
I have a new column up on e-Learn called There’s No Such Thing as a Learning Object. This has been a long time coming; I was an early advocate for learning objects–and still am an advocate, in some ways. But I think that the term has gotten so badly abused that we need to do […]
Why Mashups Make the LMOS
Regular readers know that I’ve been flogging the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) pretty hard. The other day, LMOS partner-in-crime Patrick Masson and I published an article about the need to make LMS’s mash-up-friendly. Well, today, ZDNet editor David Berlind effectively connects the dots between the article and the LMOS concept.
Two New Articles in e-Learn
I just had two new articles published in e-Learn Magazine. The first one, A Call to Arms, is an opinion piece arguing that we urgently need more direct faculty-technologist collaboration in LMS design if we are to make any kind of reasonable progress. The second one, which I co-authored with my colleague Patrick Masson, is […]
The Intractable Problem of Informational Cascades
Stephen Downes’ new column on e-Learn does a great job of showing that solving the informational cascade problem is more challenging than I had presented it to be in my own article on the topic. In fact, his own analysis reveals that the problem may be harder to solve than even he himself suggests. The […]