Learning Networks
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Learning Networks Stephen Downes National Research Council Canada Learning Networks Version 1.0 – April 30, 2012 Stephen Downes Copyright (c) 2012 This work is published under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit the author and license your new creations under the identical terms. View License Deed: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 View Legal Code: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers ........................................................................................ 6 2004: The Turning Point .............................................................................................................................. 17 Online Conference Discussions ................................................................................................................... 22 Beyond Learning Objects ............................................................................................................................ 27 The Semantic Social Network ..................................................................................................................... 30 How RSS Can Succeed ................................................................................................................................. 39 EduSource: Canada's Learning Object Repository Network ....................................................................... 41 Learning in Communities ............................................................................................................................ 63 Sensitize / Desensitize ................................................................................................................................. 66 Learning Environmentalism ........................................................................................................................ 71 A People, Once Liberated... ........................................................................................................................ 74 Creating and Capturing New Knowledge .................................................................................................... 78 Distributed Digital Rights Management: The EduSource Approach to DRM .............................................. 85 Barbarian Inventions ................................................................................................................................. 107 Educational Blogging ................................................................................................................................. 120 Granularity in Learning Objects With Analogies From Engineering and Language .................................. 132 Principles of Resource Sharing .................................................................................................................. 135 Obstacles in the Path of a Blogging Initiative ........................................................................................... 139 CORDRA: ADL's Federated Content Repository Model............................................................................. 141 Supporting Social Learning Around Collections of Open Educational Content: Open Learning Support . 144 How Social is Computer Supported Collaborative Learning: Do Off-task Interactions Exist? .................. 148 Reusable Media, Social Software and Openness in Education ................................................................. 152 The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks ................................................................................................. 165 Persistent Identification and Public Policy ................................................................................................ 178 Cascades and Connectivity........................................................................................................................ 186 Understanding PISA .................................................................................................................................. 190 2004 In The Rear View Mirror ................................................................................................................... 199 The Fate of eduSource .............................................................................................................................. 208 Introduction So, this turns out to be a book about 2004, a year that I began by calling “the turning point” and that I find in retrospect as I write this introduction eight years later was exactly that. There was another version of this eBook, it may even exist, it had nice introductions for each of the articles and a different introduction, but as I write it is lost, and so here is the 2012 version of my 2004 works, a slightly different grouping of papers, but the same content, the same changes. 2004 was for me the year the network theory of learning came together. It was a significant year for me as I spent a month in Australia and found it, not in the red centre at Uluru, as I had expected, but in the rock paintings at Kakadu and the 2,000 year-old cedars on the west coast of Tasmania. It was also the year educational blogging became mainstream and Open Content was capturing the imaginations of people. This collection of papers and transcripts varies from the technical to the expository to the polemic. What we have here are not the broad strokes of a network theory of learning – these would require more time to articulate – but the details, the structures and systems that comprise such a system. From the Semantic Social Network, which lays out the different types of networks at play, to learning in communities, to content networks and resource repositories, to the idea of distributed digital rights, cascades and connectivity, the framework of the theory is put into place, bit by bit. Moncton, May 18, 2012 An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers Introduction RSS stands for ?Rich Site Summary? and is a type of XML document used to share news headlines and other types of web content. Originally designed by Netscape to create content ?channels? for its My Netscape pages, RSS has been adopted by news syndication services, weblogs, and other online information services. Because it is one of the simplest uses of XML, RSS has become widely distributed. Content developers use RSS to create an XML description of their web site. The RSS file can include a logo, a site link, an input box, and multiple news items. Each news item consists of a URL, a title, and a summary. Content developers make their RSS files available by placing them on their web server. In this way, RSS ?aggregators? are able to read the RSS files and therefore to collect data about the website. These aggregators place the site information into a larger database and use this database to allow for structured searches of a large number of content providers. Because the data is in XML, and not a display language like HTML, RSS information can be flowed into a large number of devices. In addition to being used to create news summary web pages, RSS can be fed into stand-alone news browsers or headline viewers, PDAs, cell phones, email ticklers and even voice updates. The strength of RSS is its simplicity. It is exceptionally easy to syndicate website content using RSS. It is also very easy to use RSS headline feeds, either by viewing a news summary web page or by downloading one of many free headline viewers. Though most RSS feeds list web based resources, several feeds link to audio files, video files and other multimedia. Why RSS is Important for Educational Designers RSS is the first working example of an XML data network. As such, and in this world of learning objects and metadata files, RSS is the first working example of what such a network will look like for educational designers. Just as news resources are indexed and distributed in the RSS network, so also educational resources can be indexed and distributed in a similar learning object network. The model provided by RSS is very different from the model provided today by learning content management systems (LCMSs). In the world of the LCMS, everything is contained in one very large software application. Insofar as content is distributed at all, it is distributed in bundled content libraries. This means that educational institutions must make a major investment in software and expertise in order to access learning content. RSS, by contrast, is not centralized. It is distributed. Content is not distributed in bundles, it is distributed one item at a time. There is no central store, repository or library of RSS content; it is all over the internet. To access and use RSS content in a viewer or in a web page, you do not need a large software application. A simple RSS reader will do the trick. For this reason, the distribution of educational content over the internet will look a lot more like an RSS network than it will an enterprise content management system. Many more people will use a distributed learning object network not only because it’s easier and cheaper, but because they can access much more content for much less money. As a result, the concept of syndicated educational content can really come into play. While there will always be a need for reusable learning objects (RLOs), anything that can have an educational application ? including