Gilly Salmon on designing elearning

Gilly Salmon’s book on designing e-tivities is one of those old stand-bys I keep on my night table. What I like about Salmon is, even though she’s been engaged in elearning for a while, she’s always fresh and insightful. Here she is talking about designing elearning …

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Just dance

(Photo, Just Dance, by Jason Carlin)

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How do we design for aliveness?

A couple of months ago I came across an article taken from Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William M. Snyder’s book, Cultivating Communities of Practice. The article offers some design principles for creating communities. Its central question has been sitting in my head ever since. “How do you design for aliveness?”
The nice thing [...]

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Open content is about participation, not just access

Eve Gray had a great post this week about the launch of the Capetown Declaration this week where she calls for “opening the gates of education”. She makes some great points that are worth repeating. Open education initiatives, like MIT’s Open CourseWare Initiative, aren’t just about people having access to course materials. [...]

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Advice to sink in slowly

For the past two years, graduates of University College Falmouth have designed a series of posters with advice to pass on to freshmen. Each new arrival to the College gets one. These are so whimsical and light-hearted. What a wonderful idea.

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Social objects, not learning objects

The bells went off in my head when I read David Wiley’s post about social objects. Campfires, says Wiley, serve the same purpose as content in a course.  They’re social objects.  A campfire is the thing we gather around. It’s the focal point for a good conversation, a debate, an exploration or a [...]

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Are social networks an escape from the wilds of the internet?

“For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, [...]

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David Lynch on the iPhone

The ever-interesting filmmaker, David Lynch, in a parody of Apple’s iPhone ads … (warning: there’s a bit of language)

(For my friend, Alan, don’t forget to check out Lynch’s daily weather report.)

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Sharing your message

I’ve been sidetracked by American primary politics over the past few days. I was looking at the Flickr feeds of the Democratic frontrunners (trying to measure the turnouts in New Hampshire based on the pictures) and I couldn’t help but notice how the photographs are licensed.
Hillary’s are all rights reserved, so supporters [...]

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Non, je ne regrette rien

In an age of women who sing with little synthesized butterfly voices, I love to listen to the defiance in Edith Piaf’s voice. Look at those clenched fists. You go, girl!

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