[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Dave Pollard ha "dibujado" la vida de un blogger. Uff!
En realidad describe el proceso de "blogging":

As we all know, this is a lot of work, and there's never enough time to do it perfectly. I budget 75 minutes/day for reading (the steps in red), 60 minutes/day for writing (green), 15 minutes/day for promotion (blue), and, on the weekend, 60 minutes/week for blog community activities, focused on Salon Blogs, my chosen community. As an empty-nester and night-owl, I do most of this between 8-11pm, but I try to post during prime blog time (5am-5pm) so my posts show up in the 'recently updated' lists when most people are reading.

Depende del dia, ¿no? Pero visto así, se le quitan las ganas a cualquiera.

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Stephen Downes ha expuesto en un texto breve y sin los excesos retóricos habituales en la disciplina, los principales problemas que afronta el diseño de la instrucción en relación a los objetos de aprendizaje: Designing Learning Objects (Australian Flexible Learning Community). Muy clarito.

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Octeto mencionado en el excelente eBN Educational Bloggers Network. Thanks, guys!

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

O'Reilly ha creado un RSS Dev Center... ¡pero no encuentro la salida en RSS! ¡No es posible!

Vía [Disruptive Technology]

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Stephen Downes cita en OLDaily un interesante artículo de CNET titulado "La batalla de los blogs". En realidad, deberían titularlo "La batalla por el RSS". Ideal para enterarse de qué va todo este lio si, como yo, te has perdido/aburrido hace tiempo de las escaramuzas entre Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby, et al. por definir/controlar/evolucionar el estándard RSS, las extrañas no-versiones, Atom, Echo, Pie, APIs variopintas, etc. El artículo finaliza con el siguiente vaticinio:

No one doubts Winer's contention that the market for a Web content syndication format is expanding. But Ruby and his followers have ample evidence to suggest that the growing market is increasingly willing to follow them away from Winer's RSS. Companies and individuals that have already thrown their support behind Ruby's effort include Google and its Blogger unit; Six Apart, makers of the blogging tool Movable Type; Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig; and Bray.

Si el RSS puede servir para algo más que difundir noticias cortas, que se pierden en el vacío del ciberespacio y nadie es capaz de volver a encontrar, pues a lo mejor es necesario repensarlo de arriba a abajo. El actual RSS, perdón, "los actuales RSSs", serían meras "pruebas de concepto" de lo que viene. La gente de tecnología educativa (Downes) y diversas iniciativas (Careo, Maricopa, etc.) ya han demostrado su interés por utilizarlo en el contexto de repositorios de objetos de aprendizaje, por ejemplo para difundir metadatos. "Congelar" el núcleo duro del RSS le puede costar caro a Winer. El tiempo lo dirá.

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

EdNA online es un modelo tecnológico para toda institución pública o privada que ofrezca información y servicios a la comunidad educativa a través de Internet.

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

George Siemens ha publicado un artículo en elearnspace sobre cómo ganar dinero con todo esto del elearning. No se, no se... :-)

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]


Martin Terre Blanche y Sebastian Fiedler exponen ideas muy interesantes. ¿Tal vez están pensando en una comunidad de bloggers, más allá de las paredes del aula? Parece que hay mucha gente dándole vueltas a las mismas ideas. Buena señal.

Over the past 9 months or so I have had some fun (with the help of colleagues and students in the psychology and other departments at Unisa) looking into, downloading, trying out and programming various bits and pieces of software that might help us build collaborative learning environments. Some of what we have learnt in the process is reflected in the Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook.

One thing I think I've learnt from this is that buying into (or developing) a single "juggernaut" system would be a bad idea. Why? Because increasingly learning happens in the context of real-world networks, projects, agendas; and even where it can be distinguished as a separate activity, learning is now more likely to be of the just-in-time rather than the just-in-case variety. In such a world, people do not want to go through long, complicated sign-up procedures to gain access to (or subject themselves to learning the arcane conventions of) specialised educational software. They want to use the regular tools of the knowledge trade; and when new tools are introduced, they want to be able to continue using them long after they are no longer officially signed up as students. So Blackboard or WebCT (or their excellent open source equivalents) won't do - not even with added "collaboration features". So what should we be offering students? Here's my partial list:

• Functions built on top of generic tools they already have. Computer-literate students can do the word processing and e-mailing thing blindfolded and we should use this, while also pointing them to advanced functionality already built into the software (and perhaps offering some useful add-ons/plug-ins). For example, few students (or anybody else for that matter) fully exploit the functionality in the address book functions of e-mail programs. Creative use of the distributed database formed by students' address books can be more powerful than some centralised course-specific student database, plus students gain contact management skills and tools that have value beyond the course environment.
• Protocols to be applied with generic tools. Simple things like encouraging (or enforcing) a set of conventions for the subject lines of e-mails that pass between participants in a course (or showing students how to use more than one software communication channel in parallel) can do a lot to facilitate collaborative learning.
• Easy access to and instruction in using widely-accepted, but less well known tools. Some very useful collaboration tools, such as blogs for example, have not yet reached the level of popularity where most computer-literate students are familiar with them. When we use such tools in our courses, students do have to go through a learning curve, but they're not learning how to use some education-specific system. They are becoming part of a much larger community of people who use the tool.
  
• Course or institution-specific indexing, networking and linking tools. In a collaborative learning environment, students want to interact with others working in the same field of enquiry as themselves - so need some means of finding or forming a cluster of people within the larger universe of students in a course, or in a university, or in the world; they also need to be able to keep track of developments in the cluster. The wrong way is to force everybody in a cluster to be post their contributions via the same educational software system. The right way is to use everyday tools such as blogs and RSS syndication, which make contributions available in an interoperable way. What we as collaborative learning environment developers might profitably do, is to devise useful ways of indexing and grouping and routing this information, so that participants can link up with others at those points that are most relevant to them. So, concretely: In a research methods course each student (or group of students) could maintain a blog about their research project, each with its own RSS feed. A simple indexing system would simply be a list of links to the blogs of all the students in the course - not very sophisticated, but it does add some value. A more useful index would group blogs together where students are researching similar topics or using similar methodologies. We could do this by hand, but could also develop automated aggregating tools that read each blog's feed and distill everything into a smaller number of topic (or methodology) specific feeds. There are of course many such indexing, linking and aggregating services already, but most still use fairly crude forms of aggregating. I expect to see more and more specialised and novel ways of linking and grouping learners and their learning products - and that a key differentiator for 'quality' courses will become the level of sophistication of the networking tools they offer. [Martin Terre Blanche]

Hey, Martin's post fits so nicely with what I posted only minutes ago. It sounds like Martin follows the same line of thought here when he writes...

"They want to use the regular tools of the knowledge trade; and when new tools are introduced, they want to be able to continue using them long after they are no longer officially signed up as students. So Blackboard or WebCT (or their excellent open source equivalents) won't do - not even with added 'collaboration features'."

I also think that Martin lists very crucial features for a learning environment and tool design that allows for collaboration, self-organization, and (in the long run) individual empowerment and end-user modification.

Martin is right. For these type of setups we need to support and leverage...

• Functions built on top of generic tools they (people, students, teachers, etc.) already have
• Protocols to be applied with generic tools
• Easy access to and instruction in using widely-accepted, but less well known tools.
• Course or institution-specific indexing, networking and linking tools.

[Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Ya esta aquí el canon por copia privada de CDs y DVDs. En pleno verano:

Según un reciente artículo de El Mundo a partir de septiembre se empezará a cobrar un canon por cada CD y DVD virgen vendido. La Asociación de Internautas (AI) ya ha publicado una dura nota al respecto.

Esto es la sociedad de la información. ¿Qué os pensabáis?

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]


Computer World publica un artículo sobre las investigaciones de la Carnegie-Mellon University sobre "salas inteligentes". Lo mejor, sin duda, es la foto:

Leyenda: Mobeen Bajwa, John Kembel and Erika Cheng meet in the Barn at CMU to electronically share ideas on the “Thinking Surface.” On-ceiling cameras and pattern-recognition software read head-mounted “badges” to identify the participants and track their locations.

Vía [elearningpost]

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

En Barrapunto hay una interesante discusión sobre la posibilidad de crear libros de texto "libres" para los niveles obligatorios de enseñanza. Como siempre, una de cal y tres de arena. Pero se han identificado algunos de los problemas fundamentales de la idea (a mi modesto entender): la presión de las editoriales en un negocio que mueve cifras multimillonarias, el régimen de autorización administrativa de los textos, las variedades "autonómicas", los formatos (¿electrónicos?¿para imprimir?), la resistencias de los propios profesores, etc.

Otros temas no aparecen (todavía :-) ): el control de calidad, los autores (¿quién y por qué va a escribir libros de texto "libres"?), la usabilidad de "materiales" electrónicos, etc. Posiblemente, en el debate deberían participar autores de libros de texto. ¿Los beneficios indirectos de los autores de software libre serían también aplicables los "libros libres"?

¿Mi opinión?

1. Abandonemos el "formato libro" para los materiales didácticos y empecemos a crear materiales digitales (con texto, imágenes, video, animaciones, simulaciones, cierto nivel de interactividad, hipermedias adaptativos, etc.). Algunos se podrán imprimir, otros no.

2. Creemos herramientas de autor libres para que dichos materiales didácticos los puedan crear los propios profesores con facilidad. El ejemplo del Clic (con todas sus limitaciones, pero con miles de actividades disponibles en Internet) es digno de análisis.

3. Proporcionemos a los profesores maneras no solo de producir, sino también de compartir, de encontrar y acceder, materiales interesantes para su actividad docente en Internet (i.e., librerías de objetos de aprendizaje adecuadamente etiquetados con metadatos (LOM, por ejemplo). Asumamos que se requiere un cambio cultural importante en la enseñanza (y que no se ha producido todavía ni siquiera en la Universidad, dónde estamos todo el día conectados a la red) y que España está muy retrasada en todos estos temas.

¿Comentarios?

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Sede Antonio Machado. Baeza (Jaen). Curso: "Nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación: la integración en el aula". Si alguien quiere pasarse por allí, nos tomamos unas cervecitas :-)

[Imported from Sierto 1.0]

"...everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.
The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes..." [Open Education - create.share]

La BBC es una televisión pública. Como algunas de las de aquí. ¿No?