The midden

If you’re interested in photos of Second Life events, characters and places and how they can be used in an educational context, this site is starting to showcase some interesting ideas.

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Thanks to Karl Fisch for this vision of 2020

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Although this presentation by Linda Thor, Principal at Rio Salado College in Arizona, has, unsurprisingly, a distinct North American tone about it, it is nonetheless pertinent to the HE situation in the UK.
She notes that HE Institutions cater for 4 generations in the workplace:

Mature Generation
Baby Boomers
Generation X
Generation Y

How each of these 4 distinct generations [...]

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An interesting post here from Paul Graham predicting the demise of Microsoft in today’s world of broadband, Google, Ajax and Apple. He argues that the shadow cast over the software business by Microsoft for the past 20-odd years has now lifted as a result of their increasing irrelevance in today’s world of web-based applications. [...]

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In a previous post back in January, I mentioned George Siemens’ recent book Knowing Knowledge and the associated wiki. The book has been named as one of the best 20 business books of 2006 by Dave Pollard in his “How to save the world” blog.
The wiki continues to develop with regular changes being made and [...]

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This was a joint Real Life (in London) and Second Life symposium organised by the Eduserve Foundation to examine the use of SL as a teaching and learning tool.

Speakers at the event included Stephen Downes, Gilly Salmon, Hamish McLeod, Jim Purbrick, Joanna Scott and Roo Reynolds. All presentations from the live venue were steamed [...]

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This spin-off from the JISC-funded SPIRE project polled nearly 1400 respondents between December 06 and February 07 and asked them about their knowledge and usage of Web 2.0 technologies. It’s worth noting that only about 10% of respondents were clearly identifiable as HE students, the other 90% were individuals who visited the University of Oxford’s [...]

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This week has seen an interesting JISC-sponsored online seminar (webinar!) looking at the use and impact of Web 2.0 technologies in teaching and learning in HE. It has been co-hosted by Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen, with contributions from a range of key people.
Topics covered were:

Current Practice in the use of Web 2.0 for [...]

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