Fortnightly Mailing

Educational Technology Conferences for June to December 2011

Source

The tireless Clayton R Wright (pictured) has published an updated version of his comprehensive listing of close on 800 educational technology and related education conferences worldwide.  A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings.  The list is on the ALT Open Access repository at http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2106/.

Stopping link rot - keep your posts useful with the "WebCite this page" gadget

I've been writing Fortnightly Mailing since 2002. I've long ago stopped keeping to the discipline of publishing a fortnightly list of posts; and @sebschmoller and FriendFeed have got a bit in the way of writing proper posts such as this one. Occasionally vanity gets the better of me and I look at the access statistics for Fortnightly Mailing. Yesterday I noticed several hits from Google to a 2006 posting highlighting an article by Paul Black and Christine Harris.

When I looked at the posting - here is an archived view of it - all of its links were broken, making it worse than useless. All readers will have experienced this problem when searching and finding an apparently relevant piece about something they are interested in, but with key links broken. 

I've since fixed things in the orignal by going through the fiddly and time-consuming process of finding extant versions of the three documents in question and linking to these.  Instead of storing up trouble for the future, I've linked to archived versions created in moments with the service provided by WebCite, using the free "WebCite this page" gadget that I had already installed on my browser toolbar. The gadget allows a user, in seconds, to:

• go to a URL;
• click on the gadget;
• copy and paste the WebCite archive's URL of the orginal resource to wherever they want to use it.

Obviously it is a matter of judgement when to take this approach. My ground rule is going to be: if I am linking to a resource that I think others may want to use long term, or which I fear is likely to be short-lived at its current location, then I will include a WebCite link to the resource instead of or in addition to a link to the resource itself.

Comments on the feasibility and value of this approach are welcome.

Salman Khan - turning learning inside out with video / building "a global one-world classroom"

Here, Salman Khan gives a jaw-dropping TED talk, chaired by Bill Gates in March 2011.

Below the talk I've included as text a striking extract from the talk, from 12.5 minutes in:  striking because of Khan's emphasis on data and on teachers' need to use it, because of the ambitious conclusion (I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .... that's essentially what we're trying to build), and most importantly because of Khan's comment about the dubious concept of giftedness.

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

Tim O'Reilly's "Perspectives on Open"

This is a link to a slideshare version of a talk given yesterday by Tim O'Reilly to the Open Courseware Consortium conference. Below the presentation is the transcript of O'Reilly's talk. A transcript of this kind - speaker's notes not what was actually said - cannot convey the full meaning of a talk, but, that said, it was a thinner brew than I had been hoping for, especially from points 30 onwards where O'Reilly turns his attention to Open Education. (In contrast, the transcript's earlier potted history of free software is meatier.) The talk itself, if it is made available, should be worth listening to and watching. I hope to post a link to it here.