'World English' Remains Theoretical - Forbes.com

This article confounds "World English" with "World Englishes". Non-the-less, it is interesting that the mass media has picked up on this issue.

The distinction here is that World English, in this article, refers to some kind of standard that will emerge. Though they also seem to mix in other issues of comprehensibility, dialect, and locality.

World Englishes, is the study of different Englishes around the world. For example, a study of native speakers of English (and even NNES) in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India.....

Digital Identity Mapping

This is a really neat (and useful) "Digital Identity Map". Not only is it cool to see WHAT all of these applications are, it's also cool to see HOW they fit into the Digital Identity Map.

Here's a link to a big version of the map: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=278973402&size=o

77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better | OEDb

This is an interesting post. 77 ways to learn better. I'm not sure if I agree with all of them, but they should be food for thought.

Futurist: To fix education, think Web 2.0 | CNET News.com

Well, if it's on Cnet, it's finally here.

Ok, so that is a slightly sarcastic tone. I really like what John Seely Brown has to say, but this article is at least a couple years dated. Also, let's be honest, he's probably not the best spokesperson out there. It's not that he's a bad person to talk to. He's done some great work, but there are so many others out there on the frontlines who are actually doing these things.

If you'd like an intro into the topic, see the above linked article.

2020 Vision

This post links to a great video. I love these near future projections. The EPIC video just floored me when I first saw it. This is in the same vein (same style as well) and it is no less insightful as its predessor. What makes this one different is that this presentation focuses both on general world technologies and business, but it also positions those in reference to education. This is something that EPIC did not do.

Watch and enjoy.

GIMP - Windows installers

GIMP. No, this doesn't mean lame or walking with a limp, it is an open source image editing software :)

I haven't tested it out yet, but the reviews have been pretty good.

I'll follow up with more later.

ELGG - danielcraig's dashboard

Ok, I'm back to ELGG. I'm usually pretty good at figuring this stuff out, but ELGG is rather confusing. At first I thought that I just didn't understand the concept, but that's not the case. I understand perfectly and it's a good idea, but the design is terrible.

How does anyone figure all this out? They seem to be all over the board. It reminds me of MSN Spaces (the early design), which is not a complement.

Don't get me wrong, this space is a great idea. This is an idea that is long overdue. This is social networking on a scale that could really work well for teachers. It's somewhat protected. It allows for a great amount of customization. It allows from grouping. It's really powerful in these ways.

However, it's not what I thought that it would be. It is not a super aggregator. It's not a place where I can merge my Moodle spaces, existing blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and so forth. Not that this would be an easy task. I'm sure that it would be nearly impossible. However, this is what I want from a PLE.

PLE's should work with existing services. Students shouldn't have to create new blogs for each class that they are taking. Really, they should be able to use their personal ones if they wanted. The same goes for all these other services that we are already using. All of them have rss, they really should be quite easy to pull into a solitary system in some way or other.

PLE's should not only incorporate tags, they should make it easy to filter by tags. del.icio.us does this. I can subscribe to a particular group of tags. PLE's should facilitate this process for services that use tags, but don't filter feeds by tags. There should be an option to filter these feeds. This way users can essentially designate which posts are going to go to which classes/spaces.

In the end, PLE's need to reduce the number of places (especially NEW places) that our students have to go. These days, as the technologies change so fast, we require our students to use more and more of these simply to participate in our class. While many of these are likely beneficial and support our learning goals, it takes students a month or more to get used to these distributed systems.

This is why LMS's are so popular. The users have one place to go (with one password) and they can complete all of their assignments there. Newer LMS's and CMS's are even incorporating aspects of Web 2.0 in a sort of half-assed fashion. These changes also include personal spaces in these systems that enable users to bring in feeds and start groups. This blurs the line between a PLE and an LMS at that point.

In the end, I'll keep following ELGG, but I'm not going to use it with any of my classes in the near future. I'm not even sure if the PLE concept is worth introducing until the concept is out of Beta :)

However, if anyone reads this blog, which I kind of doubt, let me know if I'm all wrong. Convince me of all the wonders of ELGG. I've heard the hype and just can't understand why.