The TeLearn dictionary and thesaurus is a useful growing resource of information giving overviews of concepts and ideas relevant to online and technology-enhanced learning. It’s in wiki form so will hopefully grow further.

The entry pointed to by this bookmark gives one of the clearer definitions of Constructionism that I have read. I particularly like the succinct characterisation that constructionism is an operationalised pedagogical branch of Constructivism (that provides a general philosophy and set of ways of understanding how people learn, but that has little so say on the subject of how to go about improving learning). Terry Anderson and I had a question posed to us at our http://www.slideshare.net/jondron/its-hardly-easy-to-be-softly-hard-freedom-and-control-in-learning-spaces at the Networked Learning Conference in Maastricht about why we did not include Constructionism in our list of generations of distance learning and I think this answers that question well: it is one of a fairly broad set of theories that fall under the constructivist umbrella and that help to define the second generation, but it is certainly not a generation in itself.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tel-thesaurus.net/wiki/index.php/Constructionism

The UK government (not my favourite government on the whole) is making great strides towards openness, bringing Jimmy Wales in to help make all academic and other public-funded research openly available and, interestingly, socially enabled. This should help to ensure the demise of the increasingly ludicrous closed model of academic publication. A great initiative, with a target of opening everything up within two years. It is hard to see how the big academic publishers will survive this assault. Good.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/01/wikipedia-research-jimmy-wales-online

Donald Clark’s ongoing series of 50 blog posts in 50 days on (very loosely speaking) learning theorists. 

I’ve been tempted to bookmark the majority of Donald’s posts in this series so far but it’s hard to single any out and there are just so many to keep up with. Most of the posts provide wonderfully succinct explanations of a great range of theorist’s ideas with relevance to learning or whose influence affected how teaching happens, as well as some great (and brief) critical analysis. Today’s post on Maslow’s ubiquitous hierarchy of needs is a good example that both explains and crushes the theory in one brief page. Many of the choices are surprising and not usually included in lists of learning theorists, including philosophers, religious leaders, biologists, psychologists, novelists and political thinkers.  Not all posts are of equal quality, but most posts on those outside the mainstream are at the very least thought provoking. An extremely eclectic range of ideas and people covered from Marx to Dewey, Jesus to Kolb, Locke to Gagne, Ignatius to Illich, and much much more, with good references and links to further reading. 

I’d highly recommend that anyone with an interest in education should start with the March 2012 archive and read them all. It’s turning into a pretty complete introductory course in learning and related topics that every teacher and learning researcher should know about.

Address of the bookmark: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca/2012_04_01_archive.html

Interesting and heartening article reporting that Harvard faculty and students are being strongly encouraged by their Faculty Advisory Council to submit articles to open-access journals, “or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs,” in the interest of “[moving] prestige to open access”. 

Athabasca University has a strong policy of openness and great support for open publication in the form of AU Press and journals such as IRRODL. It would be nice for us to adopt this next logical step as part of our institutional policy.

The full set of recommendations, that include other actions such as withdrawal from editorial boards of closed publishers and to proactively campaign against things like bundled publication packages and other prohibitive pricing models, may be found at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448

Address of the bookmark: http://io9.com/5904601/the-wealthiest-university-on-earth-cant-afford-its-academic-journal-subscriptions

An opportunity to join over 10,000 academics (so far) protesting against publisher exploitation of a lucky advantage that puts them in a position of abusable power. This particular petition is aimed at Elsevier, whose abuses are worse than most.

Address of the bookmark: http://thecostofknowledge.com/index.php

Another decent article about the absurdity of the academic publishing model.

What surprises me is that the billionaire publishers of stuff we provide for free, review for free, edit for free and then sign away copyright (which is sometimes not even ours to give) so that we can buy back our publicly funded work at ludicrous prices, do not seem to have any defense worth making. You’d think they try harder, given they can afford to buy the best marketers and spinners in the business. Maybe the argument is impossible to make.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-publishing-monopoly-challenged

Brilliant comments on browsing vs search:

“Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/99526/melody-records-amazon-flaneur

The spread of memes in Twitter may have nothing much, if anything, to do with the meme itself. The results in this paper suggest that the dynamics of the network inevitably lead to emergent patterns of meme distribution. Pretty much anything can go viral and, more significantly, it can be completely random. In real life, this seems counter intuitive, inasmuch as there must be some relevance to the content: if one tweeted a random assortment of words, or a bland statement like ‘I like popcorn’ it is hard to believe that it would go viral as rapidly as, say, the announcement of a major natural disaster or the impeachment of a president. However, it could (and does) happen, with no further explanation needed apart from ‘it is random’. That’s quite interesting.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120329/srep00335/full/srep00335.html

A nicely succinct explanation of why all learning style theories are wrong and some good thoughts on both the damage they cause and the reasons so many people believe in them. There are many much more compelling and rigorous critiques than this one, but this is an elegant summary of the central issues. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back Issues/September-October 2010/the-myth-of-learning-full.html

Canada currently tops the list as the best place to be if you are seeking an academic career, at least in terms of salary. Good to hear, especially in these times of economic uncertainty, hiring freezes, dropping salaries (in real terms) and unseemly government interventions in research funding.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/22/new-study-analyzes-how-faculty-pay-compares-worldwide#ixzz1pr0IyRqT