XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.MobileEd has a nice post on the use of smart phones in project-based learning (thanks to George Siemens for the link). The concept of building cultural encyclopedias and mixing cool multimedia presentations via cell phone technology is exciting.

Speaking of media, Derek Morrison talks about video standards or a lack thereof. To sum it up, ”

You see there’s MPEG-2 and then there’s MPEG-2 … and not all MPEG-2s are the same.”

James Farmer created this great MindManager visual from the first day at Blog Hui. Unfortunately, James lost most of his application data due to a computer snafu. We hope you’ve recovered well.

Wesley Fryer, Miguel Guhlin, Mark Ahlness, Ewan McIntosh, Darren Kuropatwa, and Jeff Allen created a great Skypecast called Podcast 40: Defining and telling the new story. As it was inspired by Dave Warlick’s earlier posts on telling a new story, Dave created an insightful response to the group’s effort. Lots of really good stuff in both posts. I’ll synthesize both (unjustly) with this great quote from Warlick:

“Guhlin said that the practices of innovative teachers are considered,
“…untried and untrue because they don’t connect with the traditional environment of school.” I think that the real story is that our schools are not connecting to (relevant to) their own goals, preparing children for their future. “

Will Richardson suggests that we may be at a turning point in terms of new technologies and education.

“So maybe it is time to reinvent this conversation. Maybe we’re moving
out of the how to and into the why. And when we get down that road a
stretch, we’ll get back to the how again, only this time with an eye on
best practice teaching and learning. Then it should get really, really
fun.”

Finally, Ben Vershbow has a nice post on some thoughts towards the establishment of an electronic press. In his post, Ben asks some significant questions:

• How might our conception of a press be updated for the networked age?
• How do we create a publishing ecology that supports discourse at all levels — from blog to working paper to monograph — focusing less on the products of scholarship and more on the process?
• In practical terms, how might this process make use of the linking, commenting, and versioning technologies developed by blogs and wikis in order to enrich the discrete and fixed scholarly text with an evolving, interactive network of discourse that encourages conversation, debate, reflection, and revision?
• How might peer review be reinvented as peer-to-peer review?