First Monday on OCW

Lessig's lonely crusade against copyright hoarders. I agree that he seems to be fighting a necessary and valiant battle (and hopefully not a losing one, however.) I'm looking forward to reading his latest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Meeting with Lynn Jones and Gary Handman

Some of us met this morning with Lynn Jones and Gary Handman from the Teaching Library. As I was leaving the meeting I asked Lynn about her blog, which she deprecated with the word "drivel". I happen to disagree with her assessment -- and was pleased that she updated her blog today. I enjoy talking to Lynn and it's great to continue our conversation through our blogs. For example, Lynn wrote: "Learning communities. Just a fancy name for saying you get by with a little help from your friends. This concept is popping up everywhere I sit. It's the answer to why the Internet will never replace schools, colleges and universities as places of learning and collaboration. Sounds good to me." That sounds right to me too. In fact, we might need more than a little help -- we need a lot of help from friends. (I second Isaac's comment about Lynn's blog.)

Tip to fellow bloggers using Manila

Try to be precise in linking to others. For example, you can link to my blog with http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/rdhyee but if you want to link to today's homepage, you should make the link instead to http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/rdhyee/2001/12/05. I also have some anchors for larger sections (you can get the URL by clicking on the blue arrow.) For example, you can cite my blurb on IMLS precisely,

First Monday on MIT OpenCoursware

I'm reading Unexploited Resources of Online Education for Democracy - Why the Future Should Belong to OpenCourseWare from the promising online journal First Monday. At first glance, it seems to be an important read for all of us interested in the future of educational technology, indeed, education at the university.

One nitpick so far: the authors wrote: "According to an estimate by Merryll Lynch, this education market alone is worth some $US2.2 billion [1], with online education taking a big share of it. Some even go so far to claim that online education is the next killer application for the Internet." The estimate of the market strikes me as much too low. (For instance, the annual budget for UC Berkeley is on the order of $1 billion. A quick search on the web yields the following estimate: "As technology assumes a larger share of the estimated $800 billion ($2 trillion globally) education and training market, demand and sales revenues will reduce the reliance on investment." (I wrote the authors to see what they think.)

Learning from the Institute of Museum and Library Services

As I was studying the IMLS Leadership Grant for museum-library collaborations, I was intrigued by the links to projects that are related to the Interactive University. For example, the Teaching with Digital Content (a successor project to DCHC, all at UIUC) plans to make its collection of images (marked up the Dublin Core tags -- see for example, one of the Lincoln images) useful to K-12 educators. (The project is described in one of the sample grant proposals at IMLS.) We can learn a lot from the work TDC has done.

IMLS is also sponsoring a conversation concerning 21st century learning. The list of model projects is worth examining.

Technology behind blogging

Yesterday, I started writing about the technical process that I have been using in blogging -- and the compromises involved for each. It's important to note that the themes echoed in Chris' posting about the why we are blogging at the IU form the background for the technical process I'm exploring. One reason is to use this as a way of learning Manila. Another reason is to engage with fellow members of my "learning communit(ies)". I want to share with others what I'm learning, and I enjoy seeing the perspectives of others, especially as we all struggle with similar problems and questions.

I ended my post yesterday with a promise of coming back to writing about metadata and picking out the nuggets from the sludge of my postings. A posting today on David Todd-Carter's blog is apropos: "The upshot may be that the internet is a place where knowledge evolves rather than is designed. I think that's what the klogs discussion may all be about." This captures a good deal of what I think is the beauty of blogging (and, let's not forget personal journaling.) When one thinks about using metadata or categorizing the stuff emerging in blogs, one hits some of the tough issues articulated in a article refered to by David Todd-Carter. Ideally, as I write about different topics in my blog, I would also be categorizing them (and/or marking the pieces up with the appropriate metadata). However, one usually doesn't know until after the fact how to categorize things. And then when I figure out a good scheme, it is probably rather idiosyncratic -- particular to my way of looking at the world.

Right now, I'm blogging primarily with Radio. The outline metaphor fits very well with my formalist way of organizing ideas hierarchies and conceptual frameworks. I'd like now to begin tagging some items with metadata. But how to do so? One solution is to use the metadata plugin with newsitems (something I hinted at earlier) One problem I see with that solution is that forcing blogging into the newsitem mode is that it forces one to conceptualize a blog as a just a straight, flat series of discrete entries. An outline is a richer structure, allowing hierarchy. What I want, therefore, is more being able to attach information from the Metadata plugin to OPML nodes. (Hmmm....maybe there are some possible new developments in the Metadata plugin world that might help out.)

I'd like to go back through my blog and harvest the best materials and gather and relate the materials, looking for latent connections.

To be continued....

Nov Jan

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