Testing disqus replies
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
762 days ago
I had trouble with the DISQUS plugin inserted manually and replies. This is a test of the reply system to see if its working properly via the automated plugin.
This post has not been tagged
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |  |
Archbishop Tutu on Digital Freedom
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
764 days ago
I asked our Chancellor, Archbishop Tutu to open the Digital Freedom Expo at UWC in April of last year. He was out of the country on the date of the event, but he kindly agreed to provide a video to open the exposition. As a stalward supporter of democracy and freedom in the political arena, it was wonderful to have is words of support and encouragement for digital freedom.
In the days of the Apartheid, UWC stood as the intellectual home of the Struggle for Political freedom and justice for all citizens of South Africa. This university, of which I am proudly the Chancellor, engaged not just in protest, but in protest based on a deep intellectual engagement with the social, economic and political implications of freedom. UWC helped to change our country for the better.
In 1994 South Africans achieved political freedom at last, but somehow, maybe, the UWC collective institutional conscious forgot that Freedom is an ongoing process, and not an end that can ever be achieved. But at UWC we are not shy to use the word Freedom, and to do so in contexts where its importance is not always recognized.
In a digital world, there are many threats to our hard-won liberty. There are those who would take our ideas, and lock them up for business gain, preventing others from building on them freely subject to such reasonable constraints as society may wish to impose. There are those who would take the fruits of the human mind and lock them up, dishing them out to us in metered amounts for a fee that locks most of our people out. Then there are laws that are usurped for business reasons, and changed to rob society of its own rights.
There are software patent systems that in other countries have created patent cold wars, and produced companies whose sole business model is to patent the obvious and wait for someone else to have the same idea, and then attack them. This makes it risky for the young people of South Africa to create technology businesses out of their innovations, and stifles innovation that could lead to development, and improvements to the quality of life of our people.
To paraphrase Edmund Burke, who said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of those who would take away our freedom in the digital world is for organizations like UWC to do nothing."
But there are those, people like our keynote speakers, Creative Commons founder Prof Lawrence Lessig and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who are not content to do nothing.
Indeed there is a whole movement that is rapidly gaining momentum worldwide, arising out of the work of people like Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, creating socially responsible businesses out of the very freedoms that we are talking about.
Free Software (and Open Source), Free and Open Resources for Education, new ways to create and share cultural artifacts such as music, writing and art; all of these are changing the world. For the better.
UWC is in fact at the forefront of this movement, thanks to the work of Professor Derek Keats, the Free Software Innovation Unit within Information and Communications Services, and due in no small part to the support of Rector, Prof Brian O'Conell.
And so, as Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, I welcome you to the Digital Freedom Exposition at UWC. I am sorry that I cannot be here in person to welcome you, so I hope that you will accept this two-dimensional version as a token of my best wishes for a successful event, and for UWC to again put freedom firmly on its intellectual agenda.
And, just so you know we are serious, this video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
digital freedom free software patents liberty
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | 
|
The Wealth of Networks
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
765 days ago
Last night I wrote a post about the wealth of networks for someone I met on the airplane to Joburg. This morning it was gone. I can only surmise that my service provider must have had a database crash and restored from backups. So here is a second attempt to provide some of the video of Yochai Benkler's talks, as well as access to a downloadable version of the book and some other information.
| Video http://www.ted.com of Law professor Yochai Benkler explaining how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants. | |
| "Can other goods than knowledge and media be produced by commons-based peer production?" Yochai Benkler was one of the top speakers of Wizards of OS conference in Berlin on Sept 14, 2006. Although he was only in town for about 20h, he gave politik-digital.de an interview at his hotel. Thomas Praus and Peter Bihr asked him about the role of free information and commons-based peer production. (Note: This video is released under a Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike license.) |
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by law professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. A complete PDF of the book is freely downloadable on the wiki of the book and is available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license. Benkler has said that his editable online book is "an experiment of how books might be in the future," demonstrating how authors and readers might connect instantly or even collaborate. Unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment. I will post the link when it is working.
You can find MP3 versions of the book at Bablebooks at http://www.babblebooks.com/podcasts/WealthOfNetworks/index.htm and you can read along with it at http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/1.html
Attribution credits:
This post uses content from Wikipedia, and the videos from Youtube are embeded as per Youtube terms.
This post has not been tagged
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |  |
Education 3.0 on Terra Incognita
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
768 days ago
Christine Geith and Ken Udas facilitated a session at the National University Telecommunications Network annual meeting a little over a week ago. They used a WikiEducator as their presentation medium and workspace, and it is open for modification and development. During the past week they modified their original presentation to include information included the Terra Incognita blog and expanded on it, so it refers significantly to the Education 3.0 model to illustrate the role of Free and Open Educational Resources and the Freedom culture in the changing nature of education. You can find their work on WikiEducator.
They write:
Derek Keats and Phillip Schmitt have been developing some thinking and dialog around a concept that they are calling “Education 3.0.” The concept ties together changes in technology, patterns in relationships and communications among people living in networked societies, and educational need. The ,model, which is very much under development is also tied closely with open educational resources as an foundation.
Education 3.0 points to a changing environment that has been behind the development and growth of Open Educational Resources, and sits very much at the center of the "Freedom Culture."
In a few days I am going to try to start posting some short illustrations I have made of Education 1, 2, and 3, starting with Education 1, of which I make a good example.
education 3.0 F/OER open educational resource free and open educational resource
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Response to Entrepreneurial Education
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
768 days ago
Jon Bischke, CEO/Founder of eduFire.com sent me a link to his blog post on Entrepreneurial Education (time for us to coin a phrase…), which seems to have some overlap with the notion of Education 3.0 as proposed by Philip Schmidt and I in an article in First Monday.
We regard Education 3.0 will see a breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. That is not to say that institutions disappear, but rather they become more permeable, allowing much more interaction with individuals and other systems than the traditional bricks-and-mortor, spatially constrained institutions allow.
According to the eduFire blog:
However, I think the strictly market-driven approach has some problems of its own that may lead to replacing one problematic with another unless understanding what is good about the current systems is kept in the equation (its not all bad!).
Tertiary education, particularly universities, is able to do what it does in part because of the fact that teaching is underpinned by research. That is not to say that researchers necessarily make the best teachers, although there is a strong correlation, but that the system of innovation includes a balance between education and innovation. This is what drives the economy in well developed systems, yet, as you say, there is no direct link between remuneration and contribution. So there is definitely some need for reform, but how to reform it without killing it is a big question to which I don't have the answer. The worry I would have about market forces alone being at play is that it will gravitate towards a level of mediocrity, because on market forces alone it is hard to justify a broad range of research capability.
The other issue that you raise is less about reforming education, and more about reforming society. The reason that young people gladly spend money on games and less willingly spend money on education is two fold: society as a whole does not show that it values education to the level that it might. Thus we need to reform society. The second has to do with an area of the brain that produces pleasure sensations on the immediate result of problem-solving. We need to understand this as biological, and therefore understand that the same neuro-chemical biology can be exploited in education, instead of attaching value judgments to it and pretending that we are not chemically based life forms. A truly human education system will demand a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.
Just to be clear, I am not disagreeing with Jon, but rather imagining that in Higher Education, the strictly market-driven approach might actually not work entirely on its own. If we look at he entrepreneurial Higher Education institutions, as represented by organizations such as the University of Phoenix, we see that they tend to concentrate on undergraduate education, with masters and especially doctoral programmes making up a tiny fraction of their sales. They also have a very low research output per staffing unit. They have shifted the emphasis from research AND teaching, to just teaching (or what the market accepts as such). In the short term, this may be good for the individuals participating in this market, but the question remains whether this is what is best for society.
On the other hand, if the US becomes dominated by such insitutions, perhaps that is a good thing for Africa. Maybe we can recreate what the US lost!
education 3.0
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Choosing the right Creative Commons license for Educational Content
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
769 days ago
This is an old tutorial I made on choosing the right Creative Commons license for educational content. In particular, it tries to explain when the NonCommercial restriction is OK and when it should be avoided.
This presentation is available on http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za in multiple formats under a BY-SA license.
This post has not been tagged
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
The Non-commercial restriction in educational content
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
771 days ago
You can grab the originals on http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za
blog comments powered by Disqus
creative commons license non-commercial education free and open educational resources OER F/OER
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Web 2.0 commenting with Disqus
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
773 days ago
Disqus is a Web 2.0 commenting system. I am just experimenting with it to see how it works. Disqus claims that it makes your comments more interactive for readers and easier to manage for you — all while connecting your community with other blogs. Well, lets see how it works.
If it works well, perhaps I will make a Chisimba filter for it so that it can replace the Chisimba commenting system if the user wishes to be more Web 2.0 in their approach to comments on Chisimba pages. From what I have seen so far, it works pretty well.
blog comments powered by Disqus
web 2.0 discussion blogging comments Chisimba disqus
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Functionality mashup through using simple filters
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
777 days ago
Simple filters can be a way to make it easy for users to make use of mashups between learning management systems. To make it work, we would need to agree on a common filter syntax, and then implement it in our systems.
This post has not been tagged
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | |
The Coming Changes in Learning: Creating New Architectures Now!
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
778 days ago
I am at the IMS/GLC/University of Michigan summit on The Coming Changes in Learning: Creating New Architectures Now! I have only captured points that I found relevant, or simple enough to capture in simple text.
Welcome: Rob Abel, CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium
In his welcome, Rob Abel, CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium points out that it is hard to measure the impact of technology because we do not what it means to improve learning. He introducted the changes in learning in terms of the changes in primary technologies, and suggested we might be on the verge of Learning 3.0. He didn't seem to know about our Education 3.0 concept.
IMS is trying to find a way for all the new approaches to work together in an integrated way to create "Learning 3.0", and it is important to support the architects of what should be effectively a federation of learning technologies.
Morning Keynote: Mechanisms for Transformation of Learning.
John L. King, Vice Provost for Academic Information, Professor of Information, School of Information, University of Michigan (U-M)
We know that people learn, but little about how people learn, though we are understanding why people learn. Talked about the mesolimbic system, which is where sensations of pleasure originate, and surprise is on of the things that generate pleasure sensations. The brain may have evolved to reward the organism for learning, and pleasure is the reward for learning. Learning is related to disequilibriation (e..g a 2 year old). There is evidence that if you stop learning you die, because there is a deeply wired relationship between learning and being alive. This fundamentality is the pull part of learning.
Transformational mechanisms: repositories (e.g. libraries), printing / reading. A new one is the emergence of for profit institutions. The pull is our inate pleasure from learning, and the push is the infrastructure of education - the universities. We won, but now the landscape is changing. For profit institutions is the fastest growing sector of American education, many of them significantly virtual. Traditional institutional institutions are the ones who are mainly offering doctrates, but the for profits are growing rapidly in undergraduate areas. What kind of good is education? Public or private? Change in perceptions from majority of people saying public to majority of people saying private in the USA. There has been a change from primarily funded by state to primarily funded by student. The private institutions are able to cash in on this, traditional institutions are not dealing with it adequately.
We have to lower the marginal cost of production of learning so that we can get the global population to participate in higher education: from 200 million globally to 2 billion globally. We have a successor species, cool technologies, and a the potential to really transform education.
Panel 1: Coming Changes in Open Global Learning in the Health Sciences
- Moderator: Paul N. Courant, Dean of Libraries and former Provost; Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate
Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, U-M - James O. Woolliscroft, Dean and Lyle C. Roll Professor of Medicine, Medical School, U-M
- Peter J. Polverini, Dean and Professor of Dentistry, School of Dentistry, U-M
- Stephen R. Smith, Professor of Family Medicine, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University
Points
- James O. Woolliscroft
- It has fundamentally changed learning in medicine, as well as for practicing physicians
- Relatively uncoordinated introduction of technology in medschools
- UM Introduced web-based course in Advanced Theraputics for fourth year, and now faculty thought of doing this with all courses
- Expanded to all health sciences
- OER Global Access - One way to address global disparities
Panel 2: Creating New Architectures for Open Global Learning
Moderator: Casey White, Assistant Dean for Medical Education, Medical School, U-M
Ross Mackenzie, Strategic Development Manager (Learning and Teaching Solutions), The Open University, UK
Ted Hanss, Director, Enabling Technologies, Medical School, U-M
Lynn Johnson, Professor and Director of Dental Informatics and Information Technology, School of Dentistry, U-M
Points
- Ross Mackenzie
- Open University working with Moodle, but focus is on opening up the architecture, which is why the IMS process is important in moving beyond the monoliths
- Breaking down the monolithic applicatoins to create discrete tools that can be mixed and matched in various ways
- Social Learn project that is eLearning meets social networking, something Open Univ has always done
- Ted Hanss
- Medical school should have global impact in 5 years
- UMICH can have the same impact as MIT with respect to health, but wants to collaborate more with colleagues around the world
- Wish to use Open Courseware and technologies to change medical education
- How can an outcomes-based approach change things from the medical education model developed in the late 1800s
- Architecture includes people, learning methodologies and technologies
- Wanting to have an impact in Africa
- MIT used a producer push, but UMICH wants to co-create materials in partnerships
- Want the materials to be available in a more collaboratory approach in more editable formats
- Everybody must be a learner and a teacher
- Intellectural property clearing house
- Need to get students involved in producing the materials (DSCRIBE model)
- Bypass current modes of delivery, e.g. using mobile phones
- Medical library - can we bypass physical library
- More effective and productive
- Tools to engage learning communities with students becoming peer teachers, and working across institutions, etc
- Need tools to enable this collaboration
- Want to use software as a service model for DSCRIBE (have they thought about the bandwidth issues with respect to Africa?)
- Lynne Johnson
- "I have a dream"
- Successful with course management system
- Medical school looking at learning management system
- Perhaps it should be Learner's Management System
- Global, lifelong (out of date quickly), comprehensive, Smart
Afternoon Keynote: Learning and Teaching: The More Things Change…
Paul N. Courant, Dean of Libraries and former Provost; Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, U-M
- The romance of learning
- Being like a two year old - keep disrupting until you have achieved mastery
- Social networking and social learning are important, but they are not the only thing, there is an individual aspect of it
- There is a long, detailed, tedious component to learning
- Need to have moments of pleasure that add up to the detail of complex learning
- Development of literacy in the protestant world, with salvation as a powerful motivation
- Economic salvation should be a motivator of other kinds of learning
- Don't know what the talk is about, what is the topic?
- Library portfolio: Library was expensive and undergoing tremendous change
- Librarians are generally good at making use of technology
- Historically the value of large print collections was high because it allowed people to have immediate interaction, so it paid great universities to spend a lot of money on libraries
- The technological underpinnings are knocked out from under the print library
- Library is a purchasing agency for proprietary printed materials
- Technology wants to flatten things
- Economics of great university libraries has changed
- Transmission of information at the margins is really really cheap
- Associated industries change in terms of optimal scale, and degree of organization
- It doesn't matter where things are
- Business models?
- Business models for research and teaching change as well
- Changes in the politics around higher education, and accountability and measurable outputs
- What are we good at?
- Scholarship - carefully working out what is known and not known about some problem or phenomenon
- Not the norm in most human discourse
- Engagement
- ideas must be conveyed to count as ideas
- Rip, mix and mashup
- Interdisciplinarity and learning how people learn across disciplines
- Harnessing the commentary
- Who puts out research - good universities - how to maintain the output of these institutions in the face of changes that are dangerous (three threats, but I didn't manage to get the US cultural nuances)
- Harness technology and the collaboration that it allows to overcome some of these threats
2:00 p.m. Panel 3: Coming Changes in Content and Fair Use
Moderator: John L. King, Vice Provost for Academic Information
Allan R. Adler, Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs, Association of American Publishers
Kevin Norris, General Counsel and SVP Global Content Alliances, ProQuest
Joseph Hardin, Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Information, U-M; Founding Chair, Sakai Foundation
Perry Willett, Head, Digital Library Production Service, University Library, U-M
Jack Bernard, Assistant General Counsel, U-M
education 3.0 learning 3.0 interoperability IMS
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Twenty nine for want of a better title
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
781 days ago
Not sure if anyone ever reads this stuff since I don't track access, but I am currently in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I am visiting the University of Michigan, particularly Dr Chuck Severence, as well as attending the IMS Quarterly Meeting. We have a session planned on Functionality Mashups, which I think is a good metaphor for Education 3.0. I am trying to put that notion together into a talk: Education 3.0 as learning by mashup! Think about it. Everything that I learned in my life has been really nothing more than a lot of mashups.
mashups
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Our shrinking world
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
785 days ago
Since I am still blogged out on Terra Incognita, here is another of my photo contributions, from slideshare. Its not as popular as the underwater one, but I like it.
Feel freed to download it and use any of the pictures in it. I will put it on http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za probably by the time you read this, so it can be picked apart and reused.
This post has not been tagged
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | |
Protect our fragile oceans
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
786 days ago
Gosh its Wednesday and I promised myself I was going to blog every day. Oh well, I missed a few. Since I have no time to write anything here, spending my writing energy elsewhere, perhaps this little sampling of some of my underwater photographs from Slideshare might be restful on the eyes.
Download and use to your heart's content under a CC: BY-SA licence. I must do more of these, its had over 1200 views on Slideshare. Should I?
photographs underwater diving scuba marine ocean
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Moodle plugin for Chisimba Webpresenter
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
789 days ago
Today I wrote a Moodle plugin for Chisimba webPresent. It was my first attempt to write a Moodle plugin since I have never used Moodle before.
Chisimba webPresent is a presentation conversion and sharing module, with an integrated set of realtime online presentation tools. You can upload a PowerPoint or Open Office presentation, and it gets converted to the other format, plus PDF, flash, and images. A transcript is extracted from it, and an autoplay slideshow is created from the images using Ajax.
It also provides a filter that can be cut and pasted into any of the Chisimba based content tools, but need not be limited to the same aplication, or even to PHP applicatoins, as long as the application can handle filters and someone writes one for it.
Webpresenter also includes social networking tools including tagging of presentations, blogging, etc. Indeed, being a Chisimba application, it can use any of the Chisimba modules. While it is designed to run as a stand alone site, providing functionality for other sites to use, you can also integrate it into KEWL3 (eLearning application) as well.
Moodle is one of the most popular eLearning applications. Creating a plugin for Moodle seemed like a good idea since Chisimba does some things very well that Moodle doesn't do at all, and vice versa. With this plugin, a Moodle site could set up a Webpresenter instance, or share one with another organization. Then presentations could be used, for example, to build tutorials in Moodle using Open Office or PowerPoint.
If you are a Moodler, you can download the plugin here. Unzip it into the Moodle filters directory, and enable it using the Moodle filter manager. You can test it by going to http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za and either uploading a presentation or using one of the presentations that you will find there.
Click on a presentation thumbnail in Chameleon, and in the right panel of the presentation you will see two filters. Paste one of those filters into a moodle page after you have enabled the wpresent filter, and you will see your presentation in Moodle. Pretty cool huh?
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/filters/moodle/moodle1.jpg]
[/ALERT]
webPresent with tags (red arrow) and presentations (blue arrows). Clicking
the presentation will open it for playing in a web browser.. Click the image for
larger view.
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/filters/moodle/moodle2_detail.jpg]
[/ALERT]
Select the second filter and copy it to the clipboard. Then paste it into your Moodle page. Click image to zoom in
on the filter text.
Remote presentation playin in Moodle.
Check out chameleon at http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za
interoperability chisimba moodle elearning filters free software
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Afternoon at the aquarium: a change of pace
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
790 days ago
This is a little personal glimpse, not my usual blog posts. OK, I confess, I am really doing some usability testing on the blog tools, but its still a change.
My father in law (Sekuru - grandfather in Shona), is visiting from Zimbabwe, so today we took him to the Two Oceans Aquarium and a walk around the waterfront. The Aquarium was fascinating for him as he had never been to one before, and I think the fish were quite something to see.
The waters off the southern tip of the African continent is the mixing place of two oceans, the Indian and the Atlantic. The Two Oceans Aquarium on the V&A Waterfront showcases the incredible diversity of marine life found in these two oceans. The Aquarium is one of the top tourist attractions in Cape Town and over 3000 living sea animals, including sharks, fishes, seals, turtles and penguins can be seen there, and we saw most of them.
The aquarium has a fantastic Kelp forests exhibit, something that you can see in only two aquariums in the world - Monterey Bay Aquarium (USA) and the Two Oceans Aquarium. The Kelp Forest Exhibit houses three species of giant kelp, which provide shelter for an array of local fishes and invertebrates. Strangely enough, there are a couple of species of pink, paint-like coralline algae the live on the stalks of the kelp, and one of them is named after me: Pneophyllum keatsii. It was named by a colleague in the UK to 'acknowledge my contribution to knowledge' of these marine plants. The seaweed version of me is much thinner than the human version.
Info: You can click any of the pictures to see a larger or altered version.
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7082.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7157.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
 |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7167.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
||
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7190.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
||
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7202.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
||
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7209.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7216.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7220.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7227.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7253.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7261.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
| [ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7274.JPG] [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7287.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7295.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
[ALERT: url=http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/blog-misc/waterfront/IMG_7214.JPG]  [/ALERT] |
||
The Predator Exhibit contains 2 million litres of seawater, and includes large ragged-tooth sharks and an assortment of rays, predatory fishes and a loggerhead turtle. It is the grande finale to a tour of the Aquarium, since when you leave it you are back out at the starting point.
From there we walked down to the main tourist area of the Waterfront. The weather was gorgeous, considering its the middle of winter, so we sat for a while on the steps opposite the Clock Tower.
Situated near the site of the original Bertie's Landing Restaurant, and close to the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island, the Victorian Gothic-style Clock Tower has always been an icon of the old docks. It was the original Port Captain's Office completed in 1882. Since its restoration was completed in 1997, it has become an important focal point in the Waterfront's recent urban design. While it is interesting as a landmark on the outside, inside on the second floor is a decorative mirror room, which enabled the Port Captain to have a view of all activities in the harbour. On the bottom floor is a tide-gouge mechanism used to monitor the ebb and flow of the tide, something of importance to shipping, particularly in the days of sailing ships.
From there we went via the amphitheature, where we passed some performers on the way and found the Brazilian Marine Band playing Samba and the crowd really enjoying themselves. We saw some big warships in the harbour, and discovered that the South African, Brazilian, Argentinian and Uruguayan navies were on exercises in the South Atlantic and were in port. We went on a tour of the Brazilian and Argentinian ships. Coffee in the Waterfront mall, and then came home.
waterfront cape town aquarium navy south africa
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
A cool twitter mashup
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
791 days ago
Mashups are all the rage these days. They have many uses, including some pretty cool ones in education. There is a mashup which allows you to visualize which of your Twitter friends know each other. Not that useful, but cute none the less, and a good use of the Twitter API.
Go there...
mashup twitter social network
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
792 days ago
| Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world is a paper that I presented at a UNESCO conference in Dar es Salaam last year. It is relevant to an up-coming discussion on "Open Educational Resources" in Africa, and I thought it might be useful to make it available here. | ||
| |
||
| The concept of Education 3.0 has been used to categorize a possible future scenario of change in higher education in which we will see breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. Education in the 20th and early 21st Centuries (Education 1.0) has been based on scarcity. Professors and learning resources are scarce, so they are aggregated into institutions within which most of the key processes are contained. This containment means that the factors that contribute to quality are largely contained within individual institutions, and quality assurance is largely a matter of assuring the quality of institutional processes. An increasing abundance of free and open resources for use in education means that learning resources are no longer scarce, and a proliferation of networking and learning technologies that blur the distinction between play and study, means that sources of learning are no longer as scarce as they once were and that professors are not the only valid means to ensure that learning takes place. In an Education 3.0 world, institutions will be called on to accredit not programs of study or courses, but rather to accredit learning achieved. Learning achievements may happen in a variety of institutions, some contact and some virtual, as well as through self-study and through a resurgence of digital apprenticeships. This paper discusses the challenges of quality assuring learning achieved in the context of Education 3.0 in higher education. | ||
- You may also wish to
- download the written paper
- download a version of the presentation that you can reuse.
education 3.0 quality assurance open educational resources OER FORE
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Good to Great: refocusing ICS
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
793 days ago
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition.
"Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period of time. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence. This is the hedgehog concept, which can also be applied to the social sector - as he inticated in his second book - including higher education.
I have been using it to try to focus energies on redesigning my department, Information and Communication Services, to get over a slight backward slip of the past year or so, and reposition us on a path to great for the next 5 years. Below is the presentation I used today with all staff members. There is also a podcast of the talk with will be available shortly via the podcast module on this site.
Text adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great
Buy the books from Amazon:
good2great good to great organizational design
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Experimenting with Apture
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
796 days ago
While ferriting around in the wilds of the Web this weekend, I came across Apture. It takes weblinks and turns them into multimedia experiences. According to the Apture site,
This is my first experiment with it. I added the Apture code to my dkeats.com Chisimba skin, uploaded it to the site, and created this post.
With the speed of the Internet in South Africa, and my DSL performing at the speed of a jam melon falling up a hill, doing interesting things can be quite a pain. Nevertheless, you can check out what it does by clicking on the Chisimba or South Africa link in this page.
I will explore the opportunities to use this capability in some of the other posts. The tool is currently in Beta, and they do not say what their business model is or if it will remain free after the beta. But it is a pretty cool use of distributed computing.
web 2.0 multimedia apture
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Cellphones and the banning of pencils in the classroom
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
797 days ago
Last week I gave a seminar in the Law faculty, in which I talked about IPods and other MP3 players as well as cell phones as educational tools. Not long after, I ran into a colleague coming out of the student centre, and after a brief chat, he told me in no uncertain terms that he would never allow is students to use cellphones in the class. His argument was basically that the students might misuse them and this misuse might interfere with their learning. He pointed out that the nature of the technology makes it easy to misuse them. I thought back to my days as a student, and muttered something like
"Perhaps we should ban the use of brains as well, since they might be misused. They are easy to misuse since we do not have to do anything other than think thoughts in order to misuse them. They might be used for daydreaming, or they might be used to imagine the teacher naked. They could be used to construct an elaborate scenario of blowing up the classroom, and escaping on a rocket to Mars."
My colleague looked at me strangely, and ran off to escape my weirdness. How bizarre I thought. Googling around about this I came across an interesting blog post by Doug Johnson that relates nicely to the idea. He says:
I gotta say that this “potential misuse” as a reason for banning technologies drives me nuts. If we applied this rationale for not allowing a technology to an old, familiar technology, we’d certainly have to ban pencils from school because:
1. A student might poke out the eye of another student.
2. A student might write a dirty word with one. Or even write a whole harassing note and pass it to another student.
3. One student might have a mechanical pencil making those with wooden ones feel bad.
4. The pencil might get stolen or lost.
5. Kids might be doodling instead of working on their assignments.
To this list, perhaps we should add that a student might draw a picture of the teacher naked as another good reason to ban pencils.
change classroom cellphones new technologies
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
Facebook, Chisimba, and the Personal Learning Environment
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
816 days ago
Today on the Chisimba developer mailing list, one of the developers in Kenya asked about creating a Facebook application. Another replied and suggested that the question was off the topic.
This got me thinking about Education 3.0, and the paper i gave in Tokyo last year, where I presented a mockup of a Facebook application as an example of how social networking technologies could be used to make personal learning environments. This presentation is shown below, and I think it is worth Chisimba developers having a look at it.
We already have Brent working on the Personal Learning Desktop in XUL for the IADP project, so the notion of Personal Learning Envirnoment is not outside the scope of our current activities. It is also an area that we are exploring with some of the Sakai people.
There is lots of Chisimba functionality that could become a Facebook application, not just for PLE but for any use to which Chsisimba is put. It would be good to have that capability in the framework, perhaps even a means to generate Facebook applications from an API. In particular, I think that while Facebook is widely used, it can be a connector of people and courses, or people and X where X is any aspect of Chisimba. The wonderful API created by Paul Scott makes this feasible and relatively easy.
So I would say if someone wants to work on Facebook and Chisimba integration, then it would be AWESOME! Step one would be figuring out how to get an application into facebook. Step two would be to make a really cool Facebook app from Chisimba that allows for interesting things to happen in the PLE space. I have thrown this idea out to the Kenyan Facebook developer community, lets see if there are any takers.
But there is more to this idea than just Facebook. Widgets are all the rage nowadays. We could also look at how we can implement the W3C Widget specification, and allow Chisimba to both generate and consume W3C compliant widgets. Not that would be cool! But I will write about that another time.
Given the increasing prevalence of widgets, I have decided to devote a few blog posts to widgets and how they might be used in eLearning to achive some of the goals inherent in the idea of personal learning spaces.
Adapted from a post originally made on http://ics.uwc.ac.za on Fri, 02 May 2008 11:19:22
facebook chisimba education 3.0 widgets elearning
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
