the Design Experience Weblog Archive

Time's up for credit hour system [kairosnews.org]

"...measurements that determine what a student has learned ﾗ and not how long a student took to learn it ﾗ are more effective."

Empire State College has been doing this for years. The current term is called compentency-based learning.

11:47 AM, 31 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Learning

Are computers in the classroom useless?

Joannejacobs links to The Flickering Mind over at amazon.com in her weblog entry Techno-flop. I can't determine her opinion. The book seems to say that computers in classrooms have been a failure. I agree with this in general. I don't agree that they can't be useful. The book promotes exploration, inquiry, and hands-on learing. All of these things can be enhanced with technology. Look to Squeak and the teachers using it in classroms to support exploration and experimentation.

04:13 PM, 30 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Technology and Education , Learning

OpenACS 5.0 Alpha 1 [openacs.org]

OpenACS 5.0 alpha 1 is available. This includes the great i18n work along with major administration user interface improvements. Also available is dotLRN 2.0 alpha.

02:29 PM, 23 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

OpenACS Core Team Selected [openacs.org]

The Fall 2003 OpenACS Core Team election is complete. I was elected to a one year term. Thanks to everyone in the community. It has been three interesting years of intense learning for me.

02:27 PM, 23 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (1)
categories: OpenACS

Kairosnews | A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy [kairosnews.org]

Right now I am looking at Draft chapter: Conception and implementation of rich pedagogical scenarios through collaborative portals sites where the term C3MS is introduced. This stands for "Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems." This is a concept I can relate to. It is exactly the type of system I would like to work on using OpenACS and dotLRN. Once I finish reading the paper, I hope to have some intelligent comments. The original link was at Kairosnews, a collabortive weblog about technology and learning with some very interesting posts.

Thanks to Scott Leslie for the link.

12:37 PM, 23 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Learning

Technology Source - online magazine of technology and education [ts.mivu.org]

Here are just a few links to articles with interesting titles at The Technology Source.

RSS: The Next Killer App For Education

Blogging as a Course Management Tool

Selecting Tools for Online Communities: Suggestions for Learning Technologists

That is just the July/August 2003 issue! This looks like a very good resource.

12:30 PM, 23 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Technology and Education , Learning

Matrix of uses of weblogs in education [www.edtechpost.ca]

Scott Leslie has a great Matrix of uses of blogs in education. It breaks it down into writing and reading and for who.

03:35 PM, 09 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Technology and Education

Carl on Weblogs and Education at Bloggercon [blesius.org]

Carl of the OpenACS/dotLRN community attended Bloggercon. He writes about the potential of weblogs, and community building in an educational setting. It will be very interesting to see the interaction of weblogs, news-aggregators, and trackback int he context of a dotLRN installation.

09:03 AM, 08 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: OpenACS , Technology and Education

dotLRN and SCORM? [iu.berkeley.edu]

Raymond Yee asks if anyone is familiar with .LRN. I haven't worked on it in awhile, but I am familiar with it because I am an OpenACS developer. Based on the info of the folks working on SCORM for dotLRN there is a SCORM dev update. Looks like they are working on import and export of content and managing this data. The update was from February 2003. It would definitely be worth it to email the folks involved to see what the current status is. I know they are working on an assessment and grading package.

11:13 AM, 05 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: OpenACS , Technology and Education

Short Review of "At Work at Home: Design Ideas for Your Home Workplace" [www.kk.org]

This looks like a good book for me. As soon as I can build an addition on my house and create a proper office. I'll file this here for now.

More great stuff for home is available in the homestead category.

Getting organized is one of my goals. I found the best advice, have a place for everything. That is, before you get organized you need to have a place that every thing in your house/office/etc. belongs. Being organized means putting things away. If you don't have a place to put something away, you stash it somewhere and it breeds with the lost socks and coat hangers and soon you are overrun with "stuff." Recomendo has a little article about plastic storage bins.

04:11 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids [www.scitoys.com]

Hey, I have some kids! I like fighting robots and cars that play soccer. So I was very interested to see Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids linked from Recomendo. Building stuff to learn how it works is, I believe, one of the best ways to learn.

04:05 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Learning

Software Industry Needs More Greedy Capitalists, Part XVIII [www.swarthmore.edu]

Interesting reflection on the state of computer games for kids.

03:45 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Thoughts on Learning communities and learning networks from elearnspace blog [www.elearnspace.org]

A great discussion of how or what learning might look like in the future, focusing on the benefits of learning networks and learning communties, sprung up on Learning communities and learning networks over at the elearnspace blog. One especially interesting comment was about the differening styles of learning between ages groups. Another comment to that comment was about cultural as well as age differences.

03:30 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots [www.streettech.com]

The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots sounds like the robotics books for me. Plans for a robot made from pretty easy to find parts are available on the web site also. The Street Tech parent web site looks like an interesting technology review web site.

03:24 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Master of Fine Arts in Software [www.testing.com]

A program to offer a Master of Fine Arts in Software is being developed at the University of Illinois. This is a great idea, studying the craft of software by examining great works of software and doing research through your own creation of software. Here are some of the ways it would work:

"...
You read the work of masters, take them apart to see what makes them tick.
You do a lot of work of your own, which is critically discussed and frequently revised.
You write and teach about the craft.
It's for people who already have experience.
..."

03:16 PM, 03 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: Learning , Programming , Computer Science

Trackback is in OpenACS!

I finally committed trackback support into OpenACS. Carl asked what features could be added to the weblog package of OpenACS in 10 days. Several hackers helped out by adding the features that had hacked up with their personal web site. Categories, a CSS cleanup and trackback got added in a few days. All this is on the HEAD of the development branch of OpenACS which will become OpenACS 5.0 by November 1.

I was rewriting the comments package that trackback depends on, and I was waiting for that to be finished, but work got in the way. The trackback code was pretty simple so I just got it working the way it is. It will be easy to upgrade. This is great evidence to just write code, and forget about getting everything perfect!

Oops, I forgot to mention the reason I was posting. I am very interested in how trackback support for weblogs in dotLRN 2.0 will be used. I think trackback is an ideal application for an academic setting using weblogs.

09:46 AM, 02 Oct 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)
categories: OpenACS

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