[Unlimited Magazine](http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com) just [ran an article by Emily Senger on the massively open online course experience](http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/09/the-wild-world-of-massively-open-online-courses/). It's a good overview of open online learning, and is definitely worth reading - if only for the 6 paragraphs featuring yours truly... They also spent some of the article talking with people that actually taught the course.

> George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.

From William Gibson's Op-Ed Contributor article - Google's Earth - NYTimes.com:

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt's claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we'd go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we'd bridle, then begin our next search.

Bruce Schneier speaks at the 2010 EWI Cybersecurity Summit.

Granular explicit control over privacy is unnatural…

Electronic commerce produces data. Everything we do produces data. (in ways traditional cash-based commerce did not)

Businesses and governments are forcibly changing social norms. Who gets to make the rules?

We are not Google’s customer. We are actually Google’s product, that they sell to their customer.

Data is the pollution problem of the 21st century.

I just found this introduction to eLearning and blended learning video, produced by the United Nations University Vice Rectorate in Europe (UNU-ViE). It’s very basic, but that’s the point of the video. Could come in handy in talking with faculty members - sometimes they have interesting concepts of what eLearning is (and isn’t)…

Sticky Concepts on E-learning from UNU-ViE on Vimeo.

I recently signed up for a cell phone plan. The cheapest deal I could manage was $50/month, plus taxes and fees, and involved a 3 year contract commitment. That's $1800 over the term of the contract. And I got to pay a substantial chunk of the price of the phone, as well.

If I let myself be talked into the various bells and whistles offered as add-ons to the monthly plan, I'd be paying nearly $100/month. For a phone.

[George posted a quick note](http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2010/08/29/openness-but-only-if-its-closed/) about how an interview he gave for an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was published. Behind a paywall. The Chronicle took an interview, freely given by everyone (except, I assume, for the paid interviewer and editor?), on the topic of openness in education, and decided to lock it behind a mechanism constructed to block access to it.

I'm not going to link to The Chronicle article (or, more accurately, anything on The Chronicle, ever), so here's a screenshot of the short snippet of the article that they publish "openly" - I love how they cut it off in mid-sentence... Taking the **what**? I must know! Here's my credit card number! Please! Take it!

A [physicist and a biochemist have a conversation about grades](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2010/08/and_just_suppose_you_had_no_gr.php?utm_source=selectfeed&utm_medium=rss"), decide that grades are dumb.

>We were talking (and surprisingly agreeing) that grades were dumb. What would happen if we stopped grading? Wouldn't that be awesome?
>
>So, what would happen if there were no grades? Here are some thoughts.

Read [the post for some of their thoughts](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2010/08/and_just_suppose_you_had_no_gr.php?utm_source=selectfeed&utm_medium=rss"). What's interesting to me is that these aren't long-haired lefty liberal hippies calling for The End of Education. They are scientists and educators, realizing that grades don't do what we think they do, and how that negatively effects the education experience.

We drove up to Jasper National Park for a few days of relaxation in the mountains. I played around with shooting video on the iPhone, and wound up with this (shot on the iPhone, and edited in Mobile iMovie):

A fascinating short experimental film, showing the flight patterns of insects through long exposure photography. An interesting way to visualize activity.

Leo had been using Google Buzz to post updates to 18,000 people. For some reason, Buzz stopped publishing his updates. This is what he learned from that :

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I've posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I've been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

and the why-fies help keep the 3-gees data usage under control.

I just stumbled across this fascinating experimental film, looking at urban activities from the perspective of the surfaces we have contact with.