Bookmarks 22-Oct-2009

A More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education
Dale Dougherty. O’Reilly Radar. 02-October-2009.
“Today, education happens in the media as well as in school. It is important that we use the media of television, in combination with new media, to support educational goals. There is even greater opportunity to combine a public broadcasting network and the interactive capabilities of the Internet to create a new hybrid framework for lifelong education.”
gml: Can you feel the erosion happening these days in the words like school or university that we usually attach to education?

The Reconstruction of American Journalism
Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson. Columbia Journalism Review. 19-October-2009.
“Rather than depending primarily on newspapers and their waning reporting resources, each sizeable American community should have a range of diverse sources of news reporting. They should include a variety and mix of commercial and nonprofit news organizations that can both compete and collaborate with one another. They should be adapting traditional journalistic forms to the multimedia, interactive, real-time capabilities of digital communication, sharing the reporting and distribution of news with citizens, bloggers, and aggregators.”
gml: Currently we think of education and media as separate industries. Perhaps the time is coming when some portion of each will coalesce into something new; perhaps a learning industry around a public commons?. Thanks to Stephen Downes for his mention of this article on OLDaily.

Why Mozilla Education?
Mark Surman. commonspace. 01-February-2009.
“[W]ell run open source source communities are inherently engines of learning. People can show up to a project like Mozilla with basic skills and a willingness to contribute. From there, they can: study the code and the project; get feedback on their contributions; work with more more experienced contributors to create things and solve problems. If all goes well, they leave (or move on to help others in the project) not only with better coding skills, but also with a deep understanding of how to work in a global collaborative community environment. While it’s more like apprenticeship than a PhD, there is no question that this is a process of learning.”
gml: A browser company in the education business? Why not. Project-based learning integrates many diverse content areas around topics of personal importance. I certainly learn best around projects both large and small. Also related is my post Imagining Tomorrow’s University.

Google Wave Samples Gallery: Best Practices & New Features
Pamela Fox. Google Wave Developer Blog. 15-October-2009.
“When a developer submits a sample, they can specify that they’re submitting a ‘Code Snippet’ or a ‘Working Sample’. With a code snippet, instead of providing links to the robot address, gadget XML, or installer XML, they need only to provide useful lines of code. You can use this to share some bit of code that you’ve written, even if you don’t want to share the whole sample.”
gml: Recently I wrote about my Learning Wish List. This Google web page illustrates some of these wishes. Now we need cross-linked examples and trailmaps. On a broader note … Google is in a new learning industry, don’t you think?