Too hard to figure out how to make this all run inside the blog at the end of the day… Hop over to http://opencontent.org/tagging-as-authoring/ for some thoughts on making it drop dead simple to collect, reuse, and contextualize existing resources, and find out when tagging can be authoring. Brian, thanks for teaching me to say “small pieces loosely joined.” :)

There have been lots of articles around the blogosphere of late ringing the death bell for learning objects. It’s hard to tell if they’re right or not, because no one can agree about what a learning object is (although I enjoyed reading that a urinal apparently qualifies). And perhaps that very statement is all that needs to be made. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not. My primary interest always has been, and I suspect always will be, in increasing access to educational opportunity to people who have been denied that right for any of a variety of reasons. I loved the learning objects idea because the “write once, use anywhere” idea had a lot of economic appeal - once an object had been created for whatever reason, we could copy it (for free) and send it (for very close to free) almost anywhere around the world to be employed in the exercise of an individual’s right to education. ...

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Holy cow. What a hysterical post by Jay Cross. The post provides a summary of the new 186 page report, “Learning styles and pedagogy post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review.” I agree that this particular body of research is all but worthless (you have to see the list of style dichotomies Jay has extracted from the report). My question, though, is can anyone point to an area of educational research that does much better?

The notion of teacher as DJ may have been implied when people started applying the “rip-mix-burn” metaphor to education, but lately I can’t seem to get it out of my head. The similarities were there even when teachers worked primarily with paper textbooks and printed research articles, but is even more pronounced now in the era of digitized resources. There are the obvious similarities… Both start with a collection of existing materials - acoustic resources like songs, sound effects, and samples, and educational resources like simulations, tutorials, and articles. Both sequence and blend these materials in interesting ways. Both do quite a bit of planning (think syllabus as playlist), perform in discrete blocks of time (think course meeting as set); and both have to make meaningful connections between the resources they choose to employ (think lecturing and discussion leading as beat matching). ...

One of the most amazing web-based tutorials I’ve seen in a very long time: try ruby! You should really give it a try.

So I think the upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 has worked. If you find kinks in the site as you bump around, please let me know.

Due to some recent publicity at digg.com and elsewhere, there have been lots of people coming to the OCW Finder (30,000 some yesterday alone). I’ve updated the listings and included tags for video and audio, making it easier for folks to find those sorts of courses.

I hesitate to even link to articles like Errol Louis’ rant against Wikipedia because I hate to drive any more traffic to them - they’re already getting far more than they deserve. You can almost hear the popular press breathing a collective sigh of relief. It’s as if they’ve been hoping and praying for something like this to happen for months. You can almost hear them saying “See! We told you so! Don’t listen to those ‘bloggers’! Stick with the establishment!” Talk about misdirecting blame. What do ‘bloggers’ have to do with wikipedia? Pot, I’d like to introduce you to the kettle. I believe you’ve met? I wonder how podcasters managed to get left out… ...

Ira Fuchs made the closing keynote at Sakai today and gave a great list of open source software that he saw as potentially revolutionizing higher education. I list those (with a few others we talked about at dinner last) here: Sakai, Kuali, Open Source Portfolio Initiative, eduCommons, Asterisk, Zimbra, OJAX. Ira’s talk set out a really fabulous vision of open source software use in higher education, built around his vision of EduCore (he stressed this is the working title only). The best part of his speech was the announcement that beginning immediately a three month study is being conducted to take the EduCore idea several steps closer to becoming a reality.