Category Archives: technical issues

Artificial Leaves from North Carolina

Thanks to reader Colleen McGuire for pointing out  this interesting development. It does look promising if it can be developed further, although as one of the researchers said, “We do not want to overpromise at this stage, as the devices … Continue reading

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Cute Math Problem

This came up in a Math Ed discussion at LinkedIn. Here A, B, and C are three finite sets. If half of the As are Bs and half of the Bs are Cs and half of the Cs are As, … Continue reading

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Network Environments for Personal Learning

In week 2, the focus of #PLENK2010 shifted from the basic terminology, and emphasis on user “client-side” tools to the “server-side” area of support tools

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myPE(N)L ctd

So here is my current Personal Environment for Networked Learning (which I think of as the interface with physically remote people and information):

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My PE(N)L

is a mess (like this post) because my data streams are not well integrated.

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PLENK Feeds

My Sept 13 post on PLEvsPLN does show up in the link from the #PLENK2010  Feeds List, but never seems to have been captured by the aggregator for the Daily.  So I’m giving it another go here just to see … Continue reading

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PLENK Week 1

Week 1 of the #PLENK2010 course on Personal Learning Environments,  Networks and Knowledge is devoted mainly to getting used to the terminology.

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Who Needs Saving?

It is disappointing to see a supposedly sophisticated voice of religion still so literalistic.

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More Defense of Links

Scott Rosenberg (who I was led to by Crawford Killian) shares my skepticism re the “studies” cited by Nick Carr. And what is more, he actually took the trouble to read them carefully and point out some of the nonsense … Continue reading

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Back From the Future

An article in DISCOVER Magazine discusses an apparent influence of the decision to make later measurements on the results of earlier ones. But then it turns out that the effect persists even when the later measurement is not recorded. Such … Continue reading

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Who’s a Dick?

In his writings[1] Dick Feynman was never a dick (except perhaps in the eyes of those responsible for security during the Manhattan Project), and Dick Dawkins is not usually a dick but sometimes he comes close. I suspect that I … Continue reading

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Data Sharing Speeds Research

An article in the NYTimes (coming to me via Michael Geist) reports progress in Alzheimer’s research coming as a result of researchers adopting the principle of open data.

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CRTC consultation on Obligation to Serve

For what it’s worth, here is the main point I made in my submission today: with regard to the question about ensuring access for all Canadians, I said: CRTC should set national rate caps for broadband access via both telephone … Continue reading

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@maferarenas on microblogging and learning

My linking to this is evidence for @Downes of more real interesting learning from #CritLit2010. But it’s not just the shape of the network that’s important here; it’s also the semantic content of what we are linking about. (If we … Continue reading

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Is Google Evil?

No this isn’t about the Verizon thing; it’s something completely different. I was looking at both Feedblitz and Google’s Feedburner as tools for offering email subscription service, but despite claims in the help files on both sites that Google is … Continue reading

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New Web Host

For some time I have been looking forward to the arrival of WordPress v3 which, among other things, enables easily setting up a separate blog for the CMR website. But to install it I needed my host to run a … Continue reading

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Mythical Myths – #1: People read on the web

Many of the items in this list of usability myths are genuine myths, but the very first one is not. There are two reasons that “People read on the web” is not a myth (by which I mean a widely … Continue reading

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Assessing Learning in #CritLit2010

Stephen Downes post on Semantics at Half an Hour: Having Reasons is devoted largely to the issue of how to establish the well-foundedness aspect of knowledge as well-founded true belief. A large part of the discussion was devoted to the … Continue reading

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CritLit2010

#CritLit2010 is now over. I enrolled in this largely out of curiosity about what it would entail and in the knowledge that my travel plans for subsequent weeks would make it difficult to devote much time to it.  I was … Continue reading

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Categories, Links, and Tags

Both Heli Nurmi and MCMorgan have commented on the CritLit2010 week 4 reading from Clay Shirky Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags. I can’t help feeling that the idea that search based on content and tags will … Continue reading

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