Sure, China gets all the attention for having the largest internet population. But don’t overlook the internet population in Europe, with countries like Russia, France, Spain, and Denmark…
Open educational resources (OER) continue to gain significant popularity. It’s an exciting space. Lots happening: pen text book publishers, OER wikis, handbooks and tutorials, etc. Just came across…
I’ll take a brief respite from my usual dismissal of all things 2.0 to highlight a nice article by Thomas Vander Wal: Tale of Two Tunnels: “the difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is…
Last year, we hosted a highly successful event: Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovation.
This year, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I are again organizing as week-long online conference: …
The best place to be an author or consultant these days has to be the field of personal productivity. Who isn’t overwhelmed these days? Information Overload: Time for a data diet? looks at the…
Most often, I don’t finalize a presentation until just before the conference. The world has a habit of changing frequently. For an upcoming conference in Portugal, however, I was asked to submit a…
If you scratch the surface of training and development in any organisation you realize that management doesn’t really care about learning; they want measurable performance. This is understandable…
So lately I’ve been talking and thinking more and more about this idea of a “performance standard” that reads something like “Students create, grow and navigate online personal learning networks in…
If you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator like Google Reader, this post will be redundant. But, if you’re reading this on the site or newsletter, take a look at this one minute presentation on…
Last November, Chris Lott and I had a somewhat energetic chat on the whole concept of digital natives. I felt (and still do) that the term is not useful. Chris argued that the term is useful as a…
I haven’t been posting much this Summer but I’ve taken some time to catch up on my reading and my social bookmarks are growing. Here are some items that have caught my interest:
We (as in humanity) often view ourselves as being logical. We spend much time in philosophy classes debating the nature of logic, playing with logic tables, and generally convincing ourselves that…
Jay Cross digs through training and development’s closet and asks: Whatever happened to performance support? He explores the roots of performance support, its rapid rise, and then apparent…
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Robin Good of MasterNewMedia. The video of our discussion is now available. The conversation was somewhat diverse in topics,…
Some stories are so bizarre that you have to wonder if they’re true, but this one (via Ewan’s Delicious bookmarks) about a policeman in Cheyenne, Wyoming who was brought in to “teach” kids about…
Read/Write Web has taken up the call of Enterprise 2.0 with a new channel on the subject and starts by examining the nature of the firm, how large corporations have amassed huge wealth and control…
I haven’t read all of the ebooks listed…but this is a useful listing of 20 free ebooks on social media. The list includes resources on podcasting, blogging, usability and related subjects. I’m…
I’ve been involved in some way with LearnNB since its inception in 2003. For the most part, it’s been very much a maintenance of the status quo kind of professional/industrial association. There…
Howard Rheingold has been working on a project called Social Media Classroom to incorporate emerging technologies into classrooms. An instantiation of his platform is can be seen here for an…
Ray Schroeder provides a link to a great resource: NSF and the Birth of the Internet. The site includes a mix of timelines, images, videos, interviews, etc. As prominent as the internet is in…
For some, public school is already back in session, while others have a couple of weeks left. Both of our boys go back to high school after the labour day weekend. We’ve already purchased our school…
I’ve been trying to gain a better sense of the role universities will play in society in the future. At one point, we thought content was the value point of universities. Wrong. MIT’s…
I was interviewed by a radio program today on the role of Facebook in education. My view: very little research has been conducted on whether the high communicative value of Facebook translates into…
One of my favorite past times is to whine about the term web 2.0. I don’t like it. It turns what is inherently a process in to a product. It’s a marketers dream. It smacks of hype. And so on. Yet…
Via StartUpNorth is news of a bootstrapped website creation/hosting service for teachers. Classtell reminds me of edublogs but it has some differences. Firstly, it’s Canadian and…
For some reason, we like to do certain things in certain places. It’s not as comical a statement as it first appears. Consider work: we go to work, sit at a desk, or lecture in a classroom. We have…
I often encounter this type of question with regards to education: Are social networking sites good for business? The question assumes that SNS possess some intrinsic value in themselves. Simply…
I delivered a presentation to ABEL at York University this morning: Designing new learning landscapes. While preparing for the session, I was looking back at what kinds of questions we are…
The Accidental Tourist voices his concerns with cloud computing, the web mot du jour (thanks Karyn):
… there is a Gartner report endorsing cloud computing. Then the very next paragraph…
I’m on the steering committee of COHERE (Canada’s Collaboration for Online Higher Education and Research). As such, it is at least partly an obligation that I promote our annual (well, now annual…
Hans Rosling presentation at TedTalks (2006 presentation and 2007 presentation) continue to be among the more memorable I’ve seen. Rosling sold his company data visualization company -…
This is my third critical friend post regarding the excellent ‘we are media‘ project. I love a collaborative project where each time i consider dropping an idea in, or adding to the process I find…
I try and follow a diverse range of blogs - in particular between academic and corporate environments. For some reason, I have an easier time finding academic blogs. A group of corporate bloggers…
What are important directions in science? Michael Nielsen tackles this question in The Future of Science. He considers the importance of openness in science, but provides a useful overview of why…
It’s a good time to be in education. Especially online education. Numerous factors - multiple careers, distributed workforce, non-sequential learners, fuel prices, convenience, and degree creep -…
According to a recent report, Facebook continues its rapid growth, overtaking MySpace. Overall, social networking shows stronger growth than the rest of the internet. I’m somewhat surprised at…
I attended a learning conversation on Unmeetings with Jay Cross and several other very interesting people today. This will be the first of a series of dialogs on Learnscape Architecture. Jay said…
Yesterday, Sheryl and I began what we hope will be a successful process to change teaching in New Jersey on a statewide level. This fall, we’ll be running a Powerful Learning Practice cohort in…
Last week, I was in Madison for the 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. Most conferences I attend have only been around for a few years, so it was rather neat to see a…
It’s official: just over 40 years after Milgram conducted his famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, we are once again informed that the world is small. Or, perhaps more accurately, the…
Last year I went through a very long process applying for a job that had the potential to be interesting and challenging. It entailed no move on my part, mostly work from home, some international…
Science Dissemination using Open Access is a book I would have liked to encounter before my panel with Curt Bonk on Web 2.0 and Scholarship. The topics in the book are reflective of the major…
Being connected provides great opportunities. And carries challenges. Some suggest a debilitating aspect to connectivity: “I’m so connected that I’m paralysed!”. Others suggest connectivity…
This is a fascinating video How the news shapes the way we view the world. The video was posted sometime in March, but the message is interesting. I personally don’t fully equate the news we…
If this article in Innovate (registration required) didn’t keep hammering the “N-Gen” meme and all the requisite star-struck statistics and high-fallutin description so hard it would have been a…
Ross Dawson shows four representations of the social media tool landscape, with the most recent and colourful Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas:
Two of these…
YouTube appears to the be new metric or determinant of success (i.e. number of hits, presence). Having a YouTube channel is now as necessary as having a blog was 3 or 4 years ago. I was reviewing…
So this is definitely worth an hour of your time if you haven’t already invested it. (I seem to be about four days late to stuff any more…go figure.) Michael Wesch of Kansas State and the “Machine…
