Der Auszeichnung zum Mitarbeiter des Monates in Deutschland entspricht in China etwa der Auszeichnung zum Modellarbeiter (nur hat dieser noch einen sozialistischen Hintergrund und wird nicht monatlich ernannt).
In sengender Hitze am Straßenrand stehend mussten sich die Kandidaten einer bekannten Beijinger Supermarktkette dafür die Vorträge ihrer Vorgesetzten anhören – neugierig beäugt und fotografiert von vorbeilaufenden Konsumenten.

If you want to sell your magazine through iPad, you have to sell it through Apple (which will take 30 percent). The company will not allow you to sell subscriptions on your own website. Ryan Chittum writes, "Apple justifies its controlling instincts by saying the iPad (and iPhone) are a 'curated platform.' But that has little to do with letting non-pornographic magazines sell subscriptions. Apple's behavior is setting it up for some serious antitrust scrutiny down the line. It will be well deserved. Meantime, the media had better get hold of this tiger before it gets hold of them." Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review, July 28, 2010 [Tags: Apple Inc., Subscription Services] [Link] [Comment]

Larry Ferlazzo introduces us to Drag On Video, which lets us splice YouTube videos in a web page and display them as a single unit. Warning! This will eat time if you let it! Still, I can't get over how fun this is to play with. Larry Ferlazzo, Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…, July 28, 2010 [Tags: Video, YouTube] [Link] [Comment]

I still think there's something odd about the way websites have become 'apps' in Apple's world. But that said, here is a list of "top 10" education apps for the iPad. The list sounds remarkably like a list of websites: Evernote, MobileRSS, Pulse, FreeBooks, Kindle, Dragon Dictation, Seesmic or TweetDeck, iWiki, Delicious, YouTube and iTunes. I was thinking today about how really Apple is trying to replace the web with its own version, iOS, rendered as apps. Maybe Android is trying to be that too. On the other hand, my Palm uses WebOS based on Webkit. And it seems to me that we don't have to replace HTML, Javascript, CSS and the rest to have mobile platforms. Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn, July 28, 2010 [Tags: Apple Inc., Video, RSS, Wikipedia, YouTube] [Link] [Comment]

Shades of Rocketboom, it's e-Learning Today TV! I'm not sure how long they've been broadcasting, but this 9-minute video - and handy links page that is attached - is basically a talking heads newscast, but it's nice and light and will be of interest especially to people in the K-12 sector. I think I've got the right website (the videos are mirrored all over the place). There doesn't appear to be a feed specifically for e-Learning Today TV, though. Denis Soukhanov, Learning Today, July 28, 2010 [Tags: Video] [Link] [Comment]

Skillsoft surveyed workers in medium and large European companies asking how they like to learn. "They like freedom and flexibilty yes – but also ... they want learning on demand, when it's needed. They can then carry out what they have learnt straight away – with the ability to go back over something again if they haven't quite comprehended the first time." The sense I get reading this is that there is a fair support for classroom learning, but also that people would really like to have the materials later at their fingertips when they need them, whether or not they attended the classroom learning. Via email from Donald H. Taylor, Learning and Skills Group. Various Authors, Skillsoft, July 28, 2010 [Tags: European Union] [Link] [Comment]

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I don't know whether to be outraged or just gaga with bemusement at the Chronicle of Higher Education's latest folly. The article in question is titled "YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors Say." There is, in fact, no reference to cat videos anywhere in the article, nor possibly in the researchers' work (I've written them and asked, but haven't received a reply back). Rather, what we have is a short article telling us that "while many students turn to YouTube when looking for help with their homework, it can be hard to find good-quality educational clips there." This, of course, is outrageously false. And badly argued. As Alan Levine summarizes, "Two experts in biology looked at web videos for keywords in their discipline, and they found it wanting. Therefore, the only thing YouTube is Funny Cat Videos." Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Video, Research, Quality, YouTube] [Link] [Comment]

Oh, I think this point in defense of lectures is exactly right. "If you recognize that the complete sentence is 'Lectures don't work…for inexperienced or lazy learners,' then you realize that using 'active learning' with professionals at a formal conference is insulting to your audience. You are assuming that they can't learn on their own, without your scaffolding." Now, sometimes they can't actually learn, even if they are professionals - if they are learning outside their domain of expertise, for example. But people who are interested and motivated and able to learn on their own need little help - they'll turn a lecture into active learning in their own way, through note-taking, engaging with the speaker, or simply listening with an active, questioning mind. Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Online Learning, Experience] [Link] [Comment]

Very nice talk from David Gauntlett titled "Making is Connecting." The thrust of this 9 minute video is that new media supports creativity, and this creativity creates happiness through meaningful work and ties with community. Tim Kastelle relates this to his own work (and unknowingly, to mine): "we connect ideas to people. This is the outbound side of Connection. I write about the idea connections that I make in my blog – as people read it, they start connecting with the ideas. I give as many public talks as I can..." Tim Kastelle, Innovation Leadership Network, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Video, New Media, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

Letzte Woche Party auf der Autobahn. Und jetzt, die Stimmung ist verflogen, nach den Ereignissen rund um die sog. Loveparade. Einen Kilometer etwa entfernt von unseren Büros in Duisburg fand das Unglück statt. Es ist schon so viel dazu gesagt worden. Es bleibt furchtbar für die Familien und Freunde, für die ganze Stadt.

weitere Neuigkeiten vom Duisburg Learning Lab unter mediendidaktik.de

Tony Bates reports, "Recently the Open University of Hong Kong launched its free digital platform called ‘Open Learning ‘." From the description: "Open Learning gathers together a wealth of audio-visual educational materials and courseware unit covering a broad range of subject areas…There are TV programmes produced by the University's Educational Technology and Publishing Unit, and recording of talks and conferences….The platform leverages on rapidly developing social network technology to engage with learning communities. It incorporates tools for creating personalised pages and a learning log where individuals can track their learning experience." Note that the Open Learning page has a musical soundtrack, which might be inconvenient if you're recording something while browsing. Tony Bates, Weblog, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Experience, China, Audio, Personalization, Video, Networks, Online Learning Communities, Learning Communities] [Link] [Comment]

Here's another contribution to the discussion around whether class blogs should be open. "It my opinion," argues Kathleen McGeady, "it is more harmful to "protect" students through a closed blog than it is to open their eyes to the real world of online technologies through open blogs. To me, having a closed blog feels like 'pretending to use technology' and the full benefits of blogging cannot experienced." Some good discussion in the comments follows her post. And it makes me want to question the whole idea of whether blogging in a closed environment is "safe". I wonder whether students who are bullied, privately and discretely, with the teacher's compliance, feel "safe" in such closed environments. Or whether they just feel there's no way out. Kathleen McGeady, Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Experience, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

"Open education is a critique of our formal, institutionalised systems of education," writes Richard Hall. "Or so it should be," he adds. There are risks. In open eduicational resources, for example, "the focus becomes techno-determinist." Or they "simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy, in-line with the ideology of accepted business models." Or that "we fetishise the outcomes/products of our labour as a form of currency." Or "that we fetishise the learner as an autonomous agent." In other words, he writes, "The production and re-use of artefacts is of secondary importance to the social relationships that are re-defined by us, and the focus on people and values that are in-turn assembled through open education." Via Pontydysgu. Richard Hall, DMU Learning Exchanges, July 27, 2010 [Tags: Open Content] [Link] [Comment]

I agree with Scott Rosenberg - far from 'remembering everything', the web forgets things far too easily. That's why I created my site in the first place - to store stuff that I knew would disappear from discussion lists and bulletin boards. Don't believe me? Try to find anything I posted on my old NewsTrolls site (I can't give you a link because the domain was auctioned out from under me). That stuff - thousands of posts, hundreds of articles - now lives on only in my personal archive. And even that archive is incomplete, because we had an ISP that deleted content randomly when our disk space limit was reached. The web permanent? Not likely. Via Tom Hoffman. Scott Rosenberg, Wordyard, July 26, 2010 [Tags: Discussion Lists] [Link] [Comment]

"Why does the Indian Ministry of Human Ressources have to attack the non-profit OLPC organization?" So asks someone called 'Charbax' on the OLPC Blog. There could be many reasons, of course, but if it were me, I'd be pointing out that India had a perfectly good low-cost computing project going, called the Simputer, and OLPC came along acting like they had invented the concept (instead of, say, saying, "we'd like to help make Simputer better). Indeed, when we look at Asus and similar companies, it seems clear that the current revolution in inexpensive tablet computers has its origin in south and east Asia, not Cambridge or Cupertino. Charbax, OLPC//News, July 26, 2010 [Tags: Wikipedia, Project Based Learning, Paradigm Shift] [Link] [Comment]

An American judge has ruled that breaking a digital lock is not illegal if your end use was not illegal. Responding to a case filed against general Electric, which hacked through a security dongle to repair a client's power supply, the judge ruled, "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision." This ruling, if upheld, could have a significant downstream effect, specifically, as Download Squad suggests, "you're free to break DRM on media that you own. No longer is it illegal to rip your own DVDs or crippled audio CDs onto your hard disk." And Michael Geist suggests that this shows Canada's proposed new copyright legisliation will be more restrictive than that in the United States. Unattributed, Courthouse News Service, July 26, 2010 [Tags: United States, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Audio, Security Issues] [Link] [Comment]

When authors can publish directly on Amazon, what use is there then for publishers? That's the question being asked today as some big-name authors, realizing their original contracts didn't cover electronic versions of their works, published their books directly on Amazon. The authors, or their estates, representing the best of 20th century literature, are earning 70 percent royalties from Amazon, compared to the 25 percent maximum publishers are willing to grant. It's not hard to imagine authors selling directly through bookstores in the future, opting to 'publish' on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. And the publishers are probably now wishing they hadn't stalled so much on electronic editions. Via Techdirt. Alison Flood, The Guardian, July 26, 2010 [Tags: Books] [Link] [Comment]

National programs supporting open educational resources (OERs) are springing up. From a discussion on WikiEducator I learn of this Green Paper describing and making recommendations for OER initiatives in Brazil. Also, in Holland, the governmment has launched the Wikiwijs project (literally: Wiki Wise), which "is an open, internet-based platform, where teachers can find, download, (further) develop and share educational resources. The whole project is based on open source software, open content and open standards." Meanwhile the Washington State colleges board has passed a resolution saying "All digital software, educational resources and knowledge produced through competitive grants, offered through and/or managed by the SBCTC, will carry a Creative Commons Attribution License."

Good quote from the Brazil paper: "Education policy and projects that combine infrastructure investment with a coherent 'network' approach to content are the most likely to have significant positive impact and realize the goals of the policy. The ability of the Internet to create radical increases in innovation is not an accident – but it is also not guaranteed to happen simply through putting computers and courses onto the network. This 'generative' effect of networks comes from the combination of open technologies, software platforms that allow creative programming, the right to make creative and experimental re-use of content, and the widespread democratization of the skills and tools required to exercise all of those rights." Carolina Rossini, Soros.org, July 26, 2010 [Tags: Open Standards, Online Learning, Networks, Open Educational Resources, Open Content, Open Source, Project Based Learning] [Link] [Comment]

An odd commentary that says all the right things but secretly wishes things were not so. Written in part by a Canadian university president, it touts funding levels for academics and research institutions in Canada, as compared to the cuts taking place in the United States, and boasts that lower tuition fees in Canada keep things equitable. But the authors are unreserved in their praise for the American system and describe even more egalitarian tuition fees in Europe as "foolhardy." Stephen J. Toope and Neil Gross, Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2010 [Tags: United States, Canada, Research, Academia, Tuition and Student Fees, European Union] [Link] [Comment]