Open Education: Projects and Potential

Open Education: Projects and Potential

View more documents from Stephen Downes.

Source: Stephen Downes

Zimmerman Keynote Mindmap DevLearn 09

Eric Zimmerman spoke on games as the second day keynote at DevLearn.  In it, he talked about how systems thinking was important, how games are systems of rules and consequently develop systems thinking.  He talked about how our play brings meaning to the rules, and that creating spaces of possible outcomes allow us to explore.
He ended up advocating that we design for possibilities of unexpected outcomes to create meaning for our learners.

Source: Learnlets

McAfee Keynote at DevLearn 2009

Andy McAfee gave us a lively and informative presentation on his view of Enterprise 2.0. Punctuated by insightful examples, he defined Enterprise 2.0 as “”use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals”, and characterized it more simply as ‘bringing web energy into organizations’.

Along the way, he emphasized points about emergent behavior, inherent altruism, emergent process, developing innovation, the intelligence of crowds, and real business benefits. A 20% improvement in innovation was one concrete result. He also warned us of the ways to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

BTW, Cammy Bean’s has posted a prose recitation of the talk. With no further ado:

Source: LearnLets

Cloud computing in plain english

Common Craft explains Cloud Computing in Plain English. It’s a (very) broad overview of cloud computing, explaining it from the perspective of a business owner. But it seems unsatisfying and too simplistic. Most internet users have experienced some aspect of “the cloud” (in some ways, the cloud is a return to mainframe computing where storage and computation are not local) in their daily online interactions. Major software companies are pushing their data and software online – Google Docs is a great example…and Microsoft is releasing an online version of Office in 2010 (I initially thought Live.com would be MS counter to Google Docs, but the service only allowed users to upload and share documents, rather than collaboratively edit).
Cloud computing is a nebulous concept – is it a service? a concept? a technology? a series of protocols?. Currently it basically means “whatever our software company is doing right now” – just like web 2.0 in the mid 2000’s.

Source: George Siemens

The new SocialGo Concierge Plan

The history of the Internet

ZORAP Demo

Local Dirt Demo