Do You Want That on Your Permanent Record?

By ERIC FELTEN- wall street journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574432942927995848.html

What does Creativity mean to you?

A raffle for those of you who are or have been teachers. The prize is a trip to the European Union’s Creativity conference in Stockholm --> eTwinning

innovation and creativity (from elearningeurope.info)

Innovation and creativity

Creativity and innovation are becoming most crucial in knowledge societies due to the fact that no one can escape the challenges ahead of us. We live and tackle obstacles for good in an increasingly undivided world. In businesses and cultures, for example, most actors continue to apply a primarily local focus, when knowledge has a global dimension whatever we do. What does this mean to education? What kind of reforms does it call for?

(read the whole article at http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?lng=en&page=volume&vol=13)

eLearning for vocational training

A blog with useful hints on how to create lively, powerful elearning for adults in the business world: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/

InSITE 2010: Informing Science & IT Education Conference

Hi all,

this conference in Bari might be of interest to you. Deadline is 30 November, conference will be in June 2010.
http://2010.informingscience.org/

are digital technology changing our wayfinding abilities?

take a look at the video



then, see this interesting comments

from the new blog of BBC: "digital revolution"

what's become of the blogosphere?

The blogsophere is dying, apparently. The long tail of user-generated content, brimming with idiosyncrasy and experimentation - the great hope of the libertarian levelling ground promoted by the Web's founding fathers - is petering out. The anecdotal 1% of content creators (versus the 99% of content consumers) is moving away from the more formal end of story-telling/reporting (a process that takes time to craft, link, illustrate and post) because they prefer to keep in touch using quick-fire, low-cost tools like Twitter and Facebook. The result is a ghost town - nay, a ghost metropolis - of blogs that are, well, dead.

Oh the fickle, fickle Web. Oh the Ridalin-smoking, post-MTV, fast-edit generation. What have you done to our new media revolution? Don't you realise that in your absence, the new media mega corps are stepping in to perpetuate the old media models, to establish Old Boy hierarchies and to open and close the gates of information at their whims and inclinations?

Huffington, Gawker, Digg: these are the establishment figures for the next generation - the Hearsts and the Murdochs of the blogosphere. They may have started out pushing the boundaries, but now they've cemented their foundations as bridges between the people who understand the power of this new medium and those who desperately want to.

And what of the rare and the obscure ephemera that captured the imaginations of the Great Blogger Rush of 2004, when the world and its grandma got a blog because it seemed like the thing to do, and there might be a book deal at the end of it? Has the world really lost interest in, oh, I don't know - Smell-o-Vision, or has the person behind http://digiscents.com/blog/ simply realised that typing into a vacuum isn't much fun?

Of course, out of the vast sea of digital nonsense, hierarchy was inevitable. In the lean communication Internet platform, we seek out sources of information that we can trust. To establish a new resource's credibility, we must rely on heuristics of similarity and familiarity. We have to thank Arianna Huffington, Nick Denton, Kevin Rose and their media revolutionary contemporaries for standing firm at the precipice of the chasm between them and the offline big brands, otherwise we'd simply be reading the same content from the same sources. These new rebel aggregators provided a point of focus for blog consumers to gather around, highlighting quality and popular content that was an alternative to the content that Old Media thought was worthy. They've done it faster and more transparently and are more accountable to their readers.

But the result is that the great levelling ground has morphed into a giant virtual pyramid. Yesterday's revolutionary has become the today's institution. Where will the next upstarts come from?

digital native definition (West Virginia Department of Education)

Digital Immigrant

A technology user, usually over the age of thirty, who was not born into the digital world. The digital immigrant uses technology, but often attempts to bring this use into a framework s/he finds comfort in, such as printing material accessed on the Internet before reading it.

Digital Native

A technology user under the age of 30, who was born into the digital world and is accustomed to receiving information very quickly. The digital native is able to parallel-process and multi-task, and usually prefers to see graphics before text. S/he tends to be more comfortable working in a hyperlinked environment, and when s/he receives frequent rewards or feedback.

from West Virginia Department of Education http://wvde.state.wv.us/21stcenturydigitalresource/index.html