Changing the publishing model

Last week, Jay Cross hosted a discussion on the un-book and several people discussed the concept of self-publishing on the Web, given services like Lulu. The question was asked by Dave Gray, “Why publish and then get feedback?”. Also, with self-publishing the author stays in control of the process. The publishing world is changing.

Eric Frank [...]

Global Civics 301

Did you ever try to talk to teenagers about international politics or modern history? At our house, their eyes usually glaze over and the subject changes. Last night we watched Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, produced by the Morgan Spurlock who also made Fast Food Nation. This is the kind of documentary [...]

Student resources

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 supplies, which were  fewer than required in previous years.
Over the years I’ve picked up online resources that I think [...]

Classtell

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 secondly it is not free. The cost is only $20 per year and that should ensure some cashflow so that the system doesn’t collapse as it grows. It also [...]

Representing social media

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 visualizations have Conversation at the centre and this one includes, “The art of listening, learning and sharing”. Ross Dawson’s own example from last year puts social media [...]

Immersed in New Brunswick

On Tuesday the government of New Brunswick made a decision on early French immersion education, after having been forced by a court to reconsider an earlier decision. The “final” decision is one that baffles me from a research perspective but makes sense from a political one. This decision makes people feel better about being [...]

Online learning tips the scales

The price of fuel seems to be driving an uptake in online learning for higher education. Ray Schroeder has even started a blog about Fueling Online Learning, which I discovered via George Siemens.
I remember about a decade ago the discussions around the return on investment of online learning and the major factor was the reduction [...]

On literacy

Jay Cross and Clark Quinn hosted a session this week on The Future of the Book:
The net has changed everything. Young people read screens, not paper. Plus, we’re all potential publishers now.
Publishing traditionally provided editorial, production, and marketing services. Today I can buy very rapid, very good, very low-priced editing from India. On-demand publishers will [...]

Blogging rhythms

I’ve been helping out with OLDaily for the past several weeks, but Stephen is now back as editor-in-chief. The pressure of getting out a daily newsletter was much more difficult than I thought it would be. I found that I was scouring my feeds and looking for appropraite posts quite often each day, and then [...]

User Generated Context for Learning

Umair Haque’s short paper on User Generated Context has some insights pertinent to online learning. Haque says that “context” is what most users generate and that content remains an area for professionals or at least the well-known amateurs. The rest of us just add context to what is flowing from the main information nodes, like [...]

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