Learning and eLearning Archives - Page 3 of 8

John Francis- Walking the Earth, Silently

4 January, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

John Francis is a really motivated learner and educator. He walked the world for 17 years silently. Yes, without speaking. And today he is most definitely talking about it. What he says contains a lot of messages—there’s certainly one in there for you. [I heard him speak at the Digital Earth Symposium, held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007.]

In 1971 he witnessed two tankers colliding, creating an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and decided to give up riding in motorized vehicles. He began walking everywhere he went. “I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow.” So on his 27th birthday, he decided he would stop speaking for just one day “to give it a rest.” “I have to tell you it was a very moving experience…for the very first time I began listening.” He realized that (as a regular speaking human) he listened to only the first few words or sentences when someone was talking, and then “my mind would race ahead” thinking about what “I was going to say in response.” He decided to do this for another day, and another day, and this stretched to a year, and then lasted 17 years. [Continue reading and you can also view the TED talk given by John Francis in 2008…] [Read more…]

Defending yourself against patents – Patent busting at EFF

5 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

The Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF.ORG] has a “patent busting” activity that watches for patents that “should never have been granted” (my language) and works to invalidate them, or at least invalidate as many of their claims as possible.^[1] You’d be amazed at the kinds of things that have been patented that were just plain obvious, or had clearly been invented years before by someone else. I’m particularly sensitive to this because of my long history in computer-based learning and education. As an example, EFF is focusing on busting a patent on online test-taking. This one hinges on a method for charging for the tests and splitting the revenue, but nevertheless it seems absurd that someone could obtain a patent on splitting revenues from test-taking, doesn’t it?

[1] A patent hinges on any number of “claims” which are generally separate and somewhat independent of each other, and these are usually structured in such a way that they’re like ”gotchas” — if the patent owner can’t get you on one of them he may get you on another of them. There is a tension between how much is claimed by the inventor and what claims the patent office allows — and this back-and-forth starts at the time a patent application is filed, continuing until the patent is either issued, claims are removed, or the application is denied. On a granted patent, its strength is generally related to how many claims there are and how broadly they can be applied to a competing invention. Attacking a patent involves showing that individual claims should be invalidated, until you have either stricken the entire patent or reduced it to a few claims that are so weak it can no longer be effectively used.

World Science Festival- Bobby McFerrin

1 August, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

My hero in acapella music/rhythm/entertainment is Bobby McFerrin. Haven’t seen him on a stage for a long time, so when this came across my desktop I couldn’t resist. It shows how preprogrammed we are – and it also shows how many people in the audience were able to read music, because if they didn’t understand a (piano) keyboard they wouldn’t have been able to make it happen.

World Science Festival (on Vimeo)

Demand-publishing using online services

25 May, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

New from Dalai Lama Foundation Press: The most popular program of The Dalai Lama Foundation has been its study guides. Originally written by a group which met over a two-year period in Los Altos (California), the English-language study guide for His Holiness’s book Ethics for the New Millennium has been downloaded from the Foundation’s web site tens of thousands of times. The download, a PDF, can be read on screen or printed. Ethics for the New Millennium can be purchased separately, from your local bookseller or from one of many online sources. The guide has been translated into Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese. A Russian and a Japanese version of Ethics for the New Millennium are also available from the Foundation. [Read more…]

Hey! We already thought of that!

2 May, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

Doug Engelbart
in 1968

Once or twice a week I’m in a meeting, someone blurts out their fantastic new idea, and I have to bite my tongue instead of saying “hey, we thought of that years ago!”

If you’re over 30 you’re probably beginning to have that thought yourself once in a while. My favorite is when someone pops up in a meeting and says “Hey, I had this great new idea that we should use the web [or phones, or whatever] for online learning.”

When I tell them that someone first did this in 1954, why do they get so bent out of shape? (And then ignore the comment and go right back to claiming the idea as their own…) [Read more…]