Following on Anne Marie’s question yesterday regarding why you would use distributed models over centralised ones, I just had a thought I want to explore and throw out for discussion. I made an initial attempt at articulating my thoughts on the matter via a Seesmic comment, but having spent some more time thinking about it since then I believe there are additional ways we could explore this question in a much more detailed and structured way.
UNSW has released a document called the Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching at …

Anne Marie Cunningham brought a post to my attention this evening that has really got me thinking about distributed models for online learning, and in particular the technical elements I believe need to be in place to establish a framework that affords the most opportunities to teacher and students.
As always the more holistic elements such as literacies and the cultivation of a nurturing participatory learning culture amongst students and teacher are of equal if not greater importance – but considering how late it is tonight I’ll be hard pressed to …

[I freely concede I may be over-reacting in this post. Half the reason for writing it is in fact to take the power out of a standing resentment so I can start to look at the issue more objectively.]
Rant
At the risk of instigating controversy, I have a growing resentment over the excessive use and abuse of the word “pedagogy.” While the fundamental idea behind pedagogy is a very important consideration, somewhere along the line the vernacular use has been relegated to the ultimate weapon in an argument about or …

At least as a temporary solution, I’ve created a blog at WordPress.com for SpeedTech, which I hope will serve to instigate some conversation around the event and facilitate its planning.  If you’re interested in participating or staying informed with that experiment I encourage you to visit the blog and make your opinions known.
On a more fundamental level though, this experiment to me represents an initial attempt at developing a model of openness and participation that I hope will establish a road map for future projects in the same vein.  Therefore …

I just prepared the following tutorial and screencast for a colleague and wanted to post it here as well in case it’s useful.

Step One: Download Thunderbird and install on your machine as per the instructions.

Step Two: Select File -> New -> Account… Tick “RSS News & Blogs” and follow the prompts.

Step Three: Click on the heading of your new RSS News & Blogs category and click Manage Subscriptions in the main page.  In the pop-up that appears, click Add.

Step Four: Locate the RSS feed for the content you wish to …