Posted 8:36 PM by George Siemens
Learn for free online
Quote: "Like almost every organisation in the US, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent the late 1990s struggling with the question of how to take advantage of the internet. Many other colleges launched online degree courses aimed at anyone with a modem and a big wallet.
But MIT has taken a completely different direction with a project called OpenCourseWare (OCW) that could stop the trend of commercialising online education dead in its tracks. The first group of courses are set to be published on the internet on 30 September, including subjects like anthropology, biology, chemistry and computer science.
Comment:The hype of this will continue to build over the next week...but the implications will last much longer. Basically MIT is going against some recent trends of charging for content on the Internet. Instead they are using the Internet for "what it's good for" - connection people and information. Major education content providers should be concerned about this...why would a school pay for content (unless, of course, they have to buy content from certain providers in order to work in their proprietary course management systems...but that's another story...). The value of content is happening in all Internet circles - how are newspapers/magazines going to make money? Educators? Google, for example, just started a news aggregation service: Google News...run by algorithms...not people. It's a changing world...and what comes down the "pipe" has less value than the pipe itself...

Posted 8:22 PM by George Siemens
Ready or Not--PDAs in the Classroom via Stephen's Web
Quote: "And so it seems that regular old mobile computing isn’t mobile enough. Now we have an explosion of devices that promise to be even more mobile than our mobile computers—they promise to be supermobile. The business world has seen the evolution of small, special-purpose computing, from personal information managers (PIMs) to personal digital assistants (PDAs), which have now grown into the nearly full-featured PocketPC. This evolution of mobile technology from organizers to supermobile computers has led many educators to begin thinking about how to put them to use in the classroom."
Comment: No doubt PDA's will be huge in education...and that developments in wireless will push the trend. Screen size, however, is still the biggest concern...the size, portability, "always have it with you" convenience overcome this obstacle for most people. Personally, I still like a larger screen and a larger typing surface.
We are experimenting with PDAs in our department...(well, once the PDAs arrive we will be). In particular, to evaluate their use in testing and information sharing among students. As a laptop department, our students pay a technology fee that is always a concern for students. Making education more affordable may be a benefit of PDAs...but, affordability and effectiveness of a tool need to be balanced. Anyway, I'll keep you posted as the project unfolds.

Posted 8:08 PM by George Siemens
Audio Blogging
Quote: "Blogging today is essentially a text based medium. As a form of personal or professional communications, it works. But often human communications is enriched by auditory or visual emotion expressed with audio and video. Voice audio is simple and low-bandwidth, and will work for any consumer; it's also more accessible for the visually impaired."
Comment: ...mentioned this a few weeks ago...looks cool. Jeremy Allaire has created a simple tool to get prospective audio bloggers started: Audio Blog. Accessibility (visually impaired) and dialogue/debates are the first two thoughts for me...followed by - it's so much easier to scan than it is to listen - not sure how much I/others would use this tool. Flip side: it moves blogging to the realm of amateur DJ's...so it may find a market there.

Posted 7:51 PM by George Siemens
Personalizing Pedagogy
Quote: "Doesn't it seem reasonable that the best education would result from choosing teaching/learning/technology (TLT) options that best fit the individual needs and capabilities of BOTH the learners and the teachers?"
Comment: Good, short list...

Posted 7:39 PM by George Siemens
KM Czar
Quote: "Knowledge management efforts that create significant return on investment (ROI) cannot have a bottom-up focus. This is not to say that popular bottom-up KM concepts such as fostering communities of practice are necessarily detrimental. It's just that they just will not generate significant ROI."
Comment: At first read, I disagreed with this article...cold ROI calculations often overlook the improved capacity of employees to better perform their work...or i improved innovations in an organizations that allow it to meet new challenges.
However, on second read...I agree that organizations need a global focus to truly leverage ROI (the insurance example in the article explains this well). This global focus needs to come from commitment higher up in an organization...i.e. an elearning/KM initiative needs a leader who is in a position to mobilize corporate-wide resources. With that said, the innovate project in need of a leader is one that is developed at a grassroots level. Don't expect innovation from upper management...expect implementation of innovation from them. Innovation in organization always happens in small fringe groups...find the fringe groups and give them room to play.

Linux: It’s Growing More Popular, But Can It Do Windows?
Quote: "Linux, the computer operating system developed in the 1990s by a college student in Finland, is unlikely to dethrone Microsoft’s Windows as the ubiquitous operating system on desktop PCs anytime soon. But Wharton faculty and a Linux supporter say that Linux will gradually become more attractive to consumers as more applications are developed for it."
Comment: Aside from stating the extreme obvious, this article does make the point that future growth of Linux will come through companies/organizations that are focused on cost-savings. I'm surprised that Linux is not more popular in cash-strapped education circles...open source, cost savings and education - isn't that almost like mom's apple pie?...:).

Posted 11:09 AM by George Siemens
study faults entertainment companies' focus on piracy
Quote: "Media companies must put less emphasis on protecting digital content and instead find ways to make money from digital music and movies if they hope to beat back copyright pirates who threaten their businesses, according to a study released Wednesday from KPMG."
Comment: Gee...someone gets it...too bad it's not the media/content providers. Again - this will spill over into education circles