Stumbled across this project from JISC
Which may be worth looking at it relation to the virtual learning network here in NZ, which acts as a broker/aggregator for courses available in New Zealand secondary schools.
There has just been a bit of a debate on a New Zealand email list for IT people in Schools. It centred around a ministry decision to fund MS Office for schools. One side of the argument says they have to do it because students need to be taught the applications they are going to encounter in the work force - the other side says the money could be better spent elsewhere as there are perfectly usable open source office applications.
I go with the second one. I hate to think how much the Ministry is paying MS for Office lincenses for all schools, but however much it is they would be better off putting it towards paying for technical support to backup a roleout of Open Office. I imagine that for the same price as MS Office they could imploy a full time help desk person in each of our main centres just to take Open Office enquiries.
The argument about students needing to be taught the applications that they will encounter in industry is a nonsense. For a start the chances of them encountering the same version of the same app on the same OS is limited anyway, and secondly schools should be teaching concepts and IT nouse, not step by step instruction on specific apps. If somebody has a good understanding of IT concepts and a bit of nouse then they will quickly pick up any application that is thrown in front of them.
It is good to see that the ‘Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants’ concept is being questioned
http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/01/19/digital-natives-and-spaghetti-sauce
I agree with D’Arcy that the concept of ‘digital natives’ and ‘net genners’ is an overgeneralisation. These labels were good to get discussion going, and yes a bigger percentage of young people may be more comfortable/in-tune with technology than the ‘old folks’, but fitting into the digital world is as much a personality traight as a generational one. I have four children and while they all tinker around a bit with the computer and online things, three off them struggle with some things, and have to ask the fourth one for help, who is just naturally much more competent in this area.
As the title suggests I think some people are digital naturals, some aren’t. The only difference with the younger generation is that an early exposure to things digital has perhaps predisposed a large percentage of them to be ‘naturals’. But there are a huge number of people in the 30+ age bracket that are even more ‘Digital Naturals’ than the 30- age group - after all it was this generation that invented the digital age!
Perhaps we could liken it to rhythm - some people have it, some have a little, and some just don’t have it at all. However, if you expose a large number of children to intensive music education from an early age then I have no doubt that a larger percentage of them would be able to keep the beat on the dance floor, than from a second group that had no formal music education - but there would still be some from the second group that would do it naturally.
So perhaps we should drop Digital Native, or even Digital Natural, and go with Digital Groovers 
Thanks to a link in a recent comment by Leigh on my april 7 2006 post just listened to a keynote from Rob Curley.
Although it is looking at online newspapers/journalism there are some great thoughts/concepts here for online learning, and as Leigh states “Imagine if we had 1/10 of the engagement and dynamism of this in education!”.
Three comments/ideas from the keynote that stand out:
“In the new millenium jounralism can no longer be a monologue, it has to be a dialogue with our readers”. Surely that applies to education as well.
The other concept was that of hyper local journalism. As Rob Curley pointed out, there was no way his local paper could compete with CNN for international news, so their online paper dedicates itself to local news and this has been the key to its success. Food for thought here for institutions involved in learning. Perhaps the key to success is in going hyper local/hyper specialised, rather than trying to compete on a global scale.
And the final point was his comment about their youth oriented service. They set this up completely separate to the newspaper, with its own identity. One of the reasons being that a newspaper run by an over 40s editor trying to pretend that it appeals to a young audience just doesn’t work. The same thing goes for institutions and elearning companies trying to set up their own social networking sites, etc. they just can’t be hip. I can’t help thinking that if the social networking/web 2.0 concepts are to have any impact on education, and appeal to learners, they need to be kept separate from the traditional institutions.
How to Kill a Knowledge Environment with a Taxonomy
A well balanced article on the dangers of trying to enforce a strict taxonomy on any knowledge environment. Balanced in that it does not say taxonomy should be dumped and replaced with folksonomies as some current articles do, but that taxonomies should be seen as only part of the picture in the contruction of knowledge environments.
A case in point of relying heavily on taxonomies is the NZ Ministry of Education's TKI portal, where even the search interface tries to force you down the track of picking from a predefined taxonomy before being allowed to enter your own keywords. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming rebuild of this site allows for the inclusion of user defined folksonomies on the records.
Nothing radically new - but well delivered
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/06/sir_ken_robinso.html#
A useful diagram showing some of the concepts behind web2
Worth a look
At last a cross platform open source html editor that also includes some website management tools. Haven't had an extensive play, but on the surface looks quite good.
Some good thoughts on Derek's blog about evaluating LMSs. I agree with his conclusions that a list of checkpoints for evaluating current LMSs is not much use, and in fact our whole view of elearning and elearning platforms needs to be looked at if we are to move it out of the teacher/content/students transmission model that many existing LMSs pre-impose on teachers and learners.
