Techopedia impresses this relative beginner and computing autodidact

I know a bit about computing I think. Yet when you have taught yourself, as you went along, with a few (half-understood) conversations with experts in computing (but not necessarily communication) it is great to find a fall-back position where you can check your knowledge and plug the gaps. That's what techopedia.com  does for me, at a basic, easily readable level, as well as updating and rounding up my half-knowledge in the following areas for example:

• the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web
• the pioneers of the World Wide Web
• a timeline of the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web
• understanding social media
• a beginner's guide to internet memes
• 6 key trends in online business
• what do massive open online courses (MOOCs) mean for education?
• cloud computing
• top 10 cloud computing myths busted

I hope this will all be useful background to my Web Science MOOc later this month and if not I have learnt something useful anyway. It satisfied my curiosity and at some point I had to stop clicking yet another hyperlink.

Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - Opportunity, Challenge, Responsibility (Photo credit: Anna L. Schiller)

Gated communities online?

I just read about the problem caused by the enclosed nature of facebook and twitter where search engines can't readily reach. A similar situation applies to news aggegators especially since the death of google reader. News aggregators pass on the information without each reader scoring a hit on the website featured which means that it is harder to finance that site for advertising revenue. Thus aggregators do the reader a favour and the writer a potential disfavour if s/he is looking for revenue from the site.

This photo by Dean Terry on Hans Karssenberg's

http://www.inspiringcities.org/walls-of-incompetence/

somehow exemplifies that for me. Take a look at the site!

Strange that MOOCs appear at present to open up educational opportunities...
I guess if I am inexperienced in a topic I will pay for a teacher in the future
or if I'm intrapersonal and and of an autodidactic frame of mind I won't...
Either way it'll be interesting to finally see the death of the dias-centred diatribe -
I can hardly wait!

About 'The MOOC model for digital practice'

This 64 page paper presented by Alexander McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and Dave Cormi from 2010 covers the following aspects of MOOCs initially related to Canada:

• the digital economy
• as digital practice
• learner roles
• the implications
• gaps in knowledge 

It is available to download under CC licence:

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf