elearning2.0

Somehow this slipped through my net for a year. Which says a lot, since for years and years I followed Scripting News daily (it would have been the first feed I ever consumed, sometime in the last century :o). I guess I stopped listening when we got fed up developing in a proprietary and obsolescent platform and made the arduous move of all our web applications from Frontier to Zope/Plone. Still, this has got to be good news. I just wish it had been made about 4-6 years earlier, when Frontier was world-beating. We might well all have the benefit of a richer, more diverse web by now.

The beginning of a new era?

OK, "new era" may be a bit over the top, but Frontier contains an incredible combination of features, thanks in part to a vibrant community of active contributors for over a decade. UserLand will carry on with their "website and weblog publishing tools". Will a new community form around Frontier's general-purpose scripting environment? (It's starting.) Will the old fogey's come back? (Some have!) Will a new generation discover the power of an integrated, customizable development and runtime environment with persistent storage and ubiquitous outlining? Kudos to Dave Winer and UserLand for the decision.

I am a fan of Dave Winer. I always have been, and I do not care who was in the right in the little skirmish that led to atom, I always will be. It was his imagination, practicality and devotion to simplicity that gave us RSS, web-logging, XML-RPC, remote-posting APIs, etc etc --- all the best service-oriented, distributed, content-free-ing aspects of the web we live in.

But I well remember our own deep frustration with the direction that Userland Frontier went in the late 90's and early 00's. For years Frontier had been a de fact open platform for experimentation in web applications and services. It had not been 'free software', but it had been 'free of charge' and made a lovely plug-in-able platform for evolving conventions and motifs for the two-way web. Then Winer went and decided everyone needed to pay money for it! We were all shocked at the time, but we here persevered and purchased development copies, hoping that the ancient free versions would suffice for others wanting to run our apps and frameworks.

In a way, I think I was waiting and hoping for Dave ( can I call him Dave? ) to change his mind and declare Frontier to be open-source. Of course he would eventually: he had led the way in proposing the simple, small / loose open standards that built weblogging, it was clear that philosophically he was 'open'... Sadly, my own waiting went on too long, and in 2004 KnowNet laboriously ported all its work to Zope and Plone. I suspect something similar happened to a high proportion of former Frontier-based developers.

Well, here we are. We've moved to Zope, Frontier has moved to open-source. Will we ever meet again? Will anybody care enough to really push at the core of Frontier to make it into a modern framework for object-oriented application/service development? I'll tell you one thing: I've subscribed to Scripting News again :o)

I fell very ill in February and have not posted to this blog since then. I've been ramping up slowly towards having a productive life again, but it's only in the past week or so that I'm feeling 50% and able to get any real work done in a day.

My first priorities now that I'm back have got to be finishing knotes and catching up on progress with our main projects and portals. I'll be trying to get round to some serious writing though - or at least some frequent writing :o). One thing that illness taught me was that there is too little time to be putting off what I'm really interested in - which is writing and thinking not coding.

My blogging is scattered across a number of our sites. I'll be posting soon about a "My Blogging Space" feature for knotes, but until then have a look at my sidebar links for an idea of the portals I am active in. I posted quite a lot in the SIGOSSEE site last week, especialy in the Standards and Architectures Working Group, about standards, architectures and open source software for education.

I've been doing quite a lot of thinking lately about web standards, web-logging standards, and educational applications or services like ePortfolios. Watch this blog and my other blogging for posts soon to come on these and other topics.

I've been meaning to dig into wikisource more closely for a while. Inspired to have a look by seeing this noted in the de.lirio.us: entries RSS feed. Ahhh... the Levellers. For some reason this resonates like DADGAD tuning for me, I guess thanks to the punkfolkistas of the same name, and of course to the sublime World Turned Upside Down (by Leon Rosselson) so powerfully rendered by the great Dick Gaughan.

It seems appropriate. Wikipedia, wikisource and similar efforts are modern examples of mass democratic movements, 'great levellers'. And they work! Amazed and delighted, me...

The Agreement Of The People. The Levellers' Manifesto, printed 30 April 1649

Oh - and it turns out I've been wrong all these years trying to play TWTUD in DADGAD :o) Dick comments on all the tracks in Handful of Earth at footstompin.com, including notes of tuning and capo. His remarks about peaceful revolutions and violent counter-revolution are worth reading as well!

So much has been written in recent years about this period of English history that there's not much I could add here.

The English Civil War, which was in fact simply a Bourgeois Revolution, left many of its early supporters feeling cheated and betrayed.The Diggers were Christian, pacifist and could be described as primitive communists.

The conclusion of the song, in my interpretation, is that, as they were not prepared to defend themselves, they were annihilated. The evidence of history is that revolutions are usually peaceful - but the resulting counter-revolution is usually extremely bloody and ruthless. Anyone who believes that any ruling class will give up power without extreme resistance is living in a different dimension.

The guitar tuning used here was DADDAE with a capo at the 2nd fret

Technorati Tags: political folk music, social software

This is the kind of audio content that could make a podcasting convert out of many here in the UK. The BBC has announced a trail of podcasting. A list of BBC audio feeds has been posted. The programmes will only be available for 7 days after broadcast. The list itself may not please everyone: there are rights issues, apparently, preventing some of the more popular shows from being podcast. An FAQ page is available:

Can the BBC offer the Archers as a download and podcast?

Unfortunately the rights situation is very complex for all radio drama, including the Archers. Therefore we can't offer any radio dramas as downloads and podcasts as part of the current trial.

We've been working towards podcasting in knotes and RSS-2 feeds from knotes. Watch our knotations blog for more news on that front next month.

I am just noting here a reference I found to a recent book similar to the paper by De Cort which Graham cites in his recent entry...

I stumbled on this one the other day in a book I helped edit (can't find the book on line - must put it there but related papers can be found here) . Interestingly it was developed for work based learning - and pre-dates the advent of e-learning. Nevertheless I think it stands up pretty well in the e-learning age.

Aha! I have also just added a connotea shared bookmark for De Corte et al 2003. I had been frustrated trying to use the connotea bookmarklet from the Elsevier entry, but there must be a connotea plugin for Amazon - I got a nice citation from there. I'll try to remember that Amazon is the place to go to 'connotea-ise' any book. I may alter my ecto plugins to reflect this... what a rich and wonderful world this web is becoming :o).

Amazon link for Powerful Learning Environments

POWERFUL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Unravelling Basic Components and Dimensions

Elsevier link for Powerful Learning Environments

Buy online with a credit card in the Elsevier Science & Technology Bookstore: http://books.elsevier.com/elsevier/?isbn=0080442757

Edited by E. De Corte, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium, Email: erik.decorte@ped.kuleuven.ac.be L. Verschaffel, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium, Email: lieven.verschaffel@ped.kuleuven.ac.be N. Entwistle, Moray House, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Email: noel_entwistle@education.ed.ac.uk J. van Merriënboer, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands, Email: jeroen.vanmerrienboer@ou.nl

Included in series Advances in Learning and Instruction,

Description Over the past ten to fifteen years the international scene of research on learning and instruction has witnessed the emergence of important and promising developments. New theoretical frameworks, design principles, and research methodologies focusing on the construction, implementation, and evaluation of powerful learning environments have been put forward, coming from three intersecting subdomains within the broader field of research on learning and instruction - namely instructional psychology, instructional technology, and instructional design. Although it is obvious that the developments in those three subdomains are characterized by similarities and convergencies, there are still important differences. Therefore, there is a great need for scientific debate and attempts to integrate, or justify, the contrasting theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical outcomes.

A European research network, coordinated by the Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology of the University of Leuven, has been set up to work towards this end. The present volume is the first collective output of this European research network, and focuses on unravelling and identifying basic component and dimensions of powerful learning environments. It is based on the presentations and discussions that constituted the "piece de resistance" of a first meeting of the research network.

Contents General Perspectives on Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments. Identifying and Measuring Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments: Experiences and Reflections. Design and Application of Technological Tools to Support Learning in Powerful Learning Environments. The Role of Peer Tutoring and Collaboration for Promoting Conceptual Change and Intentional Learning in Different Content Domains.

Bibliographic & ordering Information Hardbound, ISBN: 0-08-044275-7, 266 pages, publication date: 2003 Imprint: PERGAMON Price: Order form USD 85 EUR 85 GBP 56.50