How do you know whether the information you are searching for online has been verified and comes from reliable sources? Are you getting into the mass-media habit of taking for granted whatever you read online? Is your critical evaluation attitude miserably fading?

Photo credit: Stephen Downes

George Siemens, MasterNewMedia official guide to education technologies and media literacy, scouts and reports from his ongoing research key future scenarios where the increased adoption of collaborative approaches and more effective learning styles unveil a new way of managing, and living successfully during these fast changing times.

Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends

by George Siemens

Innovate: Downes on MOOCs and CCK08

Over the last several weeks, we have seen a substantial amount of conversation on open education, open teaching, and accreditation. Rather timely then that Stephen Downes' article in the latest issue (free registration required) of Innovate is focused on our Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. He details how the course is set up, technologies used, participant contributions, language translations, and other delivery modalities (in Second Life, for example).

Recordings of Previous Presentation...

Recording conference presentations seems to be a given. Great way for people who couldn't attend an event to still benefit from the various talks given. Also a great way for presenters to relive mis-spoken words. Several recent presentations I've delivered are available online:

• Leading Learning - On Becoming: The cognitive and social impact of technology (.wmv file)
• Madison conference - Curt Bonk links to both of our keynotes at Madison from August... and our panel on Web 2.0 and scholarship.

Learning Communities and Learning Cities

Education is generally confined to institutions. Learning, on the other hand, is a continual, ongoing experience, running a range from formal to informal, organized to emergent, self-organized to planned.

As institutional lines continue to blur, concepts of learning communities and learning cities become more attractive (and realizable):

"Neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or regions that explicitly use lifelong learning as an organizing principle and social / cultural goal in order to promote collaboration of their civic, economic, public, voluntary and education sectors to enhance social, economic and environmental conditions on a sustainable, inclusive basis."

It could probably be better said with less words, but the idea of entire communities and related webs of libraries, museums, and other societal institutions forming the basis for a new integrated view of learning is quite attractive.

Tradition and Emergence

Click on the image above to open the presentation

I've posted the slides for a presentation I'll be delivering to COHERE's Blended Learning conference later today. Topic: Tradition and Emergence.

History of Educational Technology

Click on the image above to open the presentation

The educational technology field is almost disdainful of its own history. This is most unfortunate. We have much to be thankful for in the early innovators of the last century (and even beyond). Given the tremendously rapid pace of technology development today, I'm concerned that even the little history we have will vaporize.

Which is why I'm quite excited about a new initiative with SCoPE, Richard Schwier, and the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba: Building a Virtual Museum of Educational Technology. We all agree that museum is not the best word, but it will do for now. We are running a three week online seminar (Oct 1-21) devoted to the theme and planning ways that we can get a larger group involved.

Please join in the conversation! Rick's current master's class will be tackling the museum as a project, but we'd love to get more classes, groups, or people involved. The recording of our first session is available.

Journalism and the Internet

In education we are facing similar concerns that news media has faced for over a decade - how can the mass of amateurs online possibly recreate the authority and value of the news industry? Who will do the hard work of investigative journalism? How will we ensure that the information shared is credible?

William Dutton asks similar questions in Journalism, the Internet, and Empirical Research. He emphasizes that many concerns exist not only in internet journalism but in the information consumption habits of people in any media. In the process, he offers a fairly broad (but shallow) overview of areas needing more research...

The Next Internet

It's generally a good idea to listen when Google starts to talk about how it sees the next stages of internet development. Even more so when it is Vint Cerf speaking on behalf of the company. In a short post, he offers a (very) small glimpse of a future where the internet is integrated into all areas of our lives. Apparently, we'll be able to do our laundry through a browser. I'm just not sure how I'll do the sorting :).

Visualization

iCharts is a fairly new entrant into the data visualization space. This particular service allows people upload Excel documents and create / share interactive charts. Related - Gapminder continues to offer some of the worst URLs possible, but some of the nicest graphs for comparing data from different regions around the world.

Photo credits:
Innovate: Downes on MOOCs and CCK08 - Stephen Downes
Recordings of Previous Presentation... - Reeltoreeltaperecorder
Learning Communities and Learning Cities - University of Waterloo
Journalism and the Internet - Radu Razvan
The Next Internet - Tony Phillips
Visualization - iCharts

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on October 3rd 2008 as a weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News.

About the author

To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".