This is your brain on Twitter/facebook/email/iPhone/TV/crack cocaine. Very simple and what should be an obvious message for site designers in online learning: never show exactly the same page twice. In learning we move from one novelty to the next – that’s part of what makes it such fun. One problem with a typical coursel site that shows a static content hierarchy (rather a lot of LMS – based courses) is that the jump-off page tends to vary little. In a program I used to run I insisted that the entry point for every course was the discussion forum, driven by Michael Moore’s transactional distance theory more than anything else. However, it was a pretty good motivator too, bringing people to the sites more frequently than those for static content course sites. I thought it was just because people like to socialise and also had to keep visiting in order to know what was happening. Turns out that dopamine may have played a role in this too!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-poldrack/multitasking-the-brain-se_b_334674.html

Disfluency turns out to be rather good: people seem to learn better from things that are harder to read. Time to rethink those strategies about always making things as easy and clear as possible!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-benefit-of-ugly-fonts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Why did it take so long? Internet Exploder is about passable nowadays but not even close to best of breed and the extreme lack of trust in it that Microsoft meticulously cultivated over a decade or more should have put it to bed much sooner. Despite well publicised recent successes such as its ability to trap more malevolent sites than the rest (necessary, one might argue, because it is notably more vulnerable when it reaches them) and some long-needed if half-hearted improvements in security, speed and standards-compliance IE remains, at best, a mediocre alternative to Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. It is interesting, therefore, how a technology that is manifestly inferior to virtually all of its competitors should still occupy one of the top two places in the charts. Force of history (the big one) driven by preferential attachment and the Matthew Principle, spawned by uncompetitive practices and aggressive marketing together with some very unwise choices by Netscape at precisely the wrong time in its history might help to explain a lot of it but, given the trouble IE has caused and the ease with which it can be replaced,  I can’t help feeling there is another dynamic at work.

Pleasingly, Landing visitors seem to know better and we have seen far more Firefox users on the site than any other browser by a very sizeable margin. Indeed, even Safari seems to give IE a run for its money and Chrome, while still very much a minority browser, is starting to show up on the charts as more than just a flat line near the bottom of the Y axis.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jan/04/internet-explorer-falls-behind-firefox-europe

Big numbers. Very big numbers. Open courseware has been wonderful for MIT and wonderful for learners around the world. The costs of infrastructure to support this may be high but the payoffs seem more than worth it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/year-end_stats_from_mit_point_to_increasing_popula.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Fascinating: I particularly like ‘the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly’ – that one took a moment to absorb but makes great sense. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-netflix-uses.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Alas. 

Many years back I cursed del.icio.us for taking ideas many others (including me) had created and building something brilliant and profitable out of them. But it was a fine site and, dammit, they did build a really great system that justly deserved its success and that was streets ahead of anything the rest of us were trying to do. So now I curse Yahoo (as usual) for giving it their inimitable kiss of death.

Address of the bookmark: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

Later today I’ll be giving a talk at the AU Learning Services conference, so here are my slides.

Softening the machine (note – only available to logged in users) BIG DOWNLOAD ALERT! May slow down the server if many people do this at once. UPDATE: Scribd version of the slides for viewing in a Web browser, no big download needed, at http://tinyurl.com/37hpr37

For those who want the condensed version, here is a stream of consciousness brain dump on the message I am trying to get acroos:

Like all educational systems, Athabasca University is a machine, composed of many technologies. Some of these are directly about teaching, some with processes around it, some with helping people to work together and more. Because Athabasca developed as a distance institution in the industrial age of distance learning, based primarily on the postal service and telephones, both its institutional and teaching processes became brittle: essentially, Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance that treats distance as a continuum between structure and dialogue puts us in a tricky situation: limits on dialogue inevitably mean an increase in structure. Technologies developed from the Web 1.0 era that enable richer and more inclusive communication are changing that but they are based on a model of closed groups, focused and task-centric. And that tends to be the nature of dialogue, both in teaching and in the daily workings of the university. The real social connection stuff is still largely left to happen in more or less occasional face to face meetings. Web 2.0 technologies open that out and level the playing field, enabling serendipity, creative engagement, filling those spaces between the islands – that’s what the Landing is about, in both teaching and in ‘learning organization’ terms. However, the Landing is a soft technology: it offers enormous potential to increase the ‘adjacent possible’ but that comes at a price in terms of difficulty of use. The harder technologies from which most of Athabasca’s processes are built have the big benefit of making it easier, but at a cost of constraint. So, we are evolving the Landing so that it can make hard things softer, but also hard things softer. And it’s worth putting in the effort because the payoff can be large.

Nice article from Discover Magazine, 2005, on how Web 2.0 is different in the ways information and ideas spread when compared with simple hypertext.

Address of the bookmark: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/emerging-technology

Not at all, I fear. A primitive bit of technology but a sophisticated business model that might well work if the technology offered more. The crossover between open and closed approaches is potentially very powerful. But, as far as I can tell from a fairly cursory exploration, sadly this potential innovation seems to reinforce the wrong values and pedagogies like all the rest and seems sub-moodle in functionality. Sigh.

Address of the bookmark: http://nixty.com/course/Structure-and-Interpretation-of-Computer-Programs-MIT-Eric-Grimson