Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Author: tokyokevin

  • PLEs and learning from life, online and off

    I’m taking a MOOC right now. That is a Massively Open Online Course. There are almost 1,500 people in the class. The classroom is spread all over the world. We all learn (notice I didn’t say “study”) about PLEs, or Personal Learning Environments. This is a relatively new idea. You build your own environment to learn things. The Environment can be your friends, experts, software, libraries, web sites, schools. There are usually six parts. Let me quote from Rita Kop (one of my “teachers”.)

    The components that were formulated in Stephen Downes’ vision for a PLE at the start of the PLE project of the National Research Council of Canada are the following: 1. A personal profiler that would collect and store personal information. 2. An information and resource aggregator to collect information and resources. 3. Editors and publishers enabling people to produce and publish artifacts to aid the learning and interest of others. 4. Helper applications that would provide the pedagogical backbone of the PLE and make connections with other internet services to help the learner make sense of information, applications and resources. 5. Services of the learners choice. 6. Recommenders of information and resources.

    Here is a quick slide show about PLEs that I made for my students.

    Building a PLE

    View more presentations from Kevin Ryan.

  • Fat but not happy

    Just returned from a month of restaurants in the US, and that means an expansion of the waistline. I also bought 4 pairs of pants to replace my worn-out slacks for work. I was happy to hold my waist size to that of 3 years ago, but now realize that this too is a sham, perpetrated on all of us by the clothing industry. This from an Esquire article has me running to the bathroom scale (where I’ve returned to my January weight, erasing all the work of the spring).

    Waitline measures of slacks in the USA
    Like diagonal measurements of monitors and TVs, these are less than accurate

  • Translation Party

    TranslationParty.com
    Translate back and forth between English and Japanese until it reaches "equilibrium". See how far that is from the original.

    The site over at translation party is designed to show how machine translation still has a way to go. It shows how, when you translate into from either Japanese or English into the other language, and back again, there are still differences. It continues until there are no differences, and calls that “equilibrium”. The final version it reaches is sometimes very different from the original. You could play games by trying to find sentences that are the most different, or sentences that require the most steps (translations) to reach equilibrium. A good time-waster for translators or language students.

  • School Spirit is Alive and Well in Kansas

    Now THIS is school spirit. University of Kansas students working together to help other students get through tough times.

    via EduDemic.

  • Foreign Service Language Courses now free

    The Foreign Service institute, the school that teaches diplomats languages, has free courses available. These courses were developed with government money and are old enough (before 1989) to be in the public domain. Although dated, these courses include texts (in pdf) and tapes (in mp3), all ported to the Internet by a wonderful non-profit group. Via BoingBoing. The site was mentioned by LifeHacker and so too many people tried to download at the same time. When the servers are available again, you should check it out, or even Czeck it out. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)