It has been a fraught three days working on the new JISC-ssbr platform. After a long time of indecision we are pushed to cement something in place and live with it. I am writing this as much to check that feeds into the various blog components work.

The links through the conversation prism (http://bit.ly/rg26k) to its creator JESS3 (http://jess3.com/) and one of the sites they did (http://www.busboysandpoets.com/) led to “B Corporations” (http://www.bcorporation.net/). This appears to be a nascent US social entrepreneurship standards setting and certifying initiative. The B-rating system attempts to go further than “triple bottom line” accounting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line) and corporate social responsibility green-wash by soliciting a wide range of information about corporate practice (http://tinyurl.com/c9fsba) assessing business impact on employees, environment, communities and all stakeholders.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Seven metatrends in emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations include:

• the evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines
• the collective sharing and generation of knowledge
• computing in three dimensions
• connecting people via the network;
• games as pedagogical platforms
• the shifting of content production to users;
• and the evolution of a ubiquitous platform.

Educause, 2008. 2008 Horizon Report. Available at: http://www.educause.edu/node/162471?time=1238685860 [Accessed April 2, 2009].

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I was discussing an unpublished draft of a working paper on digital literacy at Oxford Brookes. It struck me that a communication theory model might be useful when looking at the tools we might use. The four dimensions I recognised in the paper were:

• n-0: solitary reflection
• 1-n: broadcasting ones self: blogging, writing for publication
• n-1: using a library, searching the web
• n-n: participation in discussion forums, teams.

It seemed that if one were aware of the different kinds of communication one could suggest that some tools were better for some things and some for others.

Interestingly, about a week later I was doing a bit of a lit search for Digital Literacy in Academic Search Complete and came upon Guy Merchant’s (2007) article: Writing the future in the digital age. Literacy, 41(3), 118-128. There I found the same approach used as a typology for digilit.

• One-to-one Messaging Inter-personal email
• One-to-many Broadcast messaging Blogging Webpages
• Many-to-many Chatrooms, 3D Virtual Worlds, Online gaming, Discussion boards, Wikis, Photo-sharing (123)

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