I look forward to seeing and hearing how this elgg application works Jon.

Indeed the idea of hypothesis generation as the final phase of a design based research project is the "sceiency" way to think and talk about research. But it is to get away from that thinking that makes me prefer words from design sphere. One deosn't formally test a hypothesis when designing a building or a table, one normally just builds it, based upon implicit and explicit design principles from past, plus any emergent innovations. If successful, based upon esthetics and user adoption, then the innovation moves slowly towrds being an established 'design principle".  Not just a confirmed hypothosis.

Really the two aren't that dissimilliar, but I like the design orientation. 

Finally, indeed a scaled down DBR research project (as done for a thesis or final project) rarely leads to the format or adoption of grand design principles, but as you suggest smaller iterations that create enough success to justify the intervention and enough ideas for an iterative round of doing it again.

I don't know about grand design principles: I suspect they only occur more often in bigger projects because of quantity, rather than quality, though there is probably also a benefit to be had from having a team discussing and trying things - more opportunities for discovery and serendipity as a result of diverse views. Those smaller iterations are often where the biggest innovations emerge though - the 'aha!' moments come at least as often from tinkering and realising that things could be different as from reflective review. In fact, it is often a result of mistakes or surprise side-effects (exaptations) so it's a dialogue with the tools. And that's why I like 'hypothesis' ...

The table you are building is not a test of the hypothesis: it is the hypothesis. The test of it occurs in the iteration (the third stage); as you use it, then go back to the previous stage and think about what you have done, what effect it had, whether there were any issues, surprises or adjacent possibles, then maybe modify it or start to make a new one. The implementation of the idea (the hypothesis) is not the same thing as the idea - it's something else, in which the materials, ways it is used, constraints, path-dependencies and side-effects play an important role too. I rather like that - it's a science of the concrete that puts proper emphasis on the created object as opposed to just the ideas that inform it. The things we create are not a product of the thinking process but part of it, with an interdependent and important role to play. It's a way of recognizing the distributed nature of cognition, how the objects and processes we create contribute meaningfully as an active part our thoughts and beliefs.

The plugin installs OK, but it relies on some IMS QTI files that I don't have access to yet, though it looks like it should be possible to import questions etc from any QTI package - no time to check at the moment, but I will do so when things get less busy. It's not a brilliantly written plugin for general purpose use as it mixes in a whole load of theming and embodied assumptions that it will be used to create a stand-alone dedicated site: not quite the Elgg way of doing things. But I think it might be the basis of something more useful.

Here's a school that offers a Minor in Open Source & Free Culture.

Interesting - a whole minor! I see that they managed to get support from various partners for that. We don't have much in the way of resources to put together a lot of courses on our own but that approach seems quite promising.

Some food for thought:

• Yes, given enough money all bugs are shallow: use Coverity:

Tom Lane pushed:

- Fix multiple bugs and infelicities in pg_rewind.  Bugs all spotted
  by Coverity, including wrong realloc() size request and memory
  leaks.  Cosmetic improvements by me.  The usage of the global
  variable "filemap" here is still pretty awful, but at least I got
  rid of the gratuitous aliasing in several routines (which was
  helping to annoy Coverity, as well as being a bug risk).
  http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c67f366fa9f748257861ee233b47b80eb5ffa857

• Yes, given enough eyeballs are bugs are shallow: Trusting Tor

Great news Jon! I think that at the very least everyone from the AU community know it is well deserved.

Excellent points, Jon. We need to take the advantage of Internet for education. Now every learner has the equipments and channels to connect with a bigger world, or even the whole world than before, not just their classmates and teachers. Learning can happen not only in a closed system, but also in an open environment, as you said "We are swimming in a sea of billions of teachers". This is what Internet brings to us, and we need to embrace the opportunity. Landing is the start.

In reality, I think education is not just learning though. That's why it would take time for changing.

Yes, you are right Hongxin - education is about more than learning! At least, our educational systems are about a lot more than what they intentionally teach. Accreditation and child-minding are obvious functions, but it is also about sustaining and (hopefully) creating culture. Educational systems are means of both establishing and replicating the shared knowledge and norms of a society, and that is a really important role. That role has for centuries been more and more distributed across other technologies (like town criers, books, newspapers, radio, TV etc), but the Internet is accelerating the rate of change, and massively altering its dynamic. We need to be highly critical of those changes and do our best to steer them in a direction that does not lead to mob rule, divisive factions, the loss of privacy, the valorization of narcissism, the shallowing of attention, and all those other things the doom-prophets rightly fear but, like it or not, the change is happening. 

Education (big 'E') is a huge complex adaptive system. Like most such systems, it has a will to survive, and has established its role in a larger ecosystem in ways that would make its immediate removal unthinkable and catastrophic, quite apart from the effects it would have on those within it.  Bearing that in mind, those of us in an educational system seldom ask whether it is needed at all - we instead ask how to improve it. The same goes of all its subsystems. We tend to ask not whether courses or classrooms or exams are necessary, but how we should make them better. That's good, up to a point - we do need to improve - but it's a bit like improving audio cassette tapes when everyone else has moved to Blu-Ray and digital streaming. Eventually, no matter how deeply entwined a system may be with the broader ecosystem, something has to give. I think we need to be ready. And, yes, the Landing is a start!

I really codn'lut ask for more from this article.
- Lucy

Thanks for sharing the Jon, it is very interesting to see how pressure from society, family and friends make you do such things, you have see in this movie people are hanging on 4th floor just to pass cheating notes without the fear of losing their own lives, this in insane. I know culture our there demands you to get higher marks to get into good universities and good jobs, no stress on actual learning or gaining knowledge.

Another, big factor especially in developing countries to get better marks is result in better wedding, yeah that is true, it is very common practice over there to look for bride especially with higher grades, its funny when you go meet you bride to be and ask so how much you got in grade 10, but its very sad. People go to great lengths to achieve higher grades and then end up in high profile jobs, making bad decisions on their jobs.

Thanks again Jon!

Shafiq

A well reasoned argument against the exam driven system that does a great job of explaining just how much of a negative impact these have on learning.  I really enjoyed reading this and was nodding alone as I read.  I am going to be sharing this post with my trainee teachers and then encouraging some debate on this, as I am sure there will be many things in this rich post that they will want to debate.  Many thanks Jon.

- Mark Curcher

Thanks Mark! 

And thanks Shafiq - I missed replying to this. Indeed, grades all too easily turn into currency. I don't think that's going to go away and I'm not sure that it should, though it is more than a little bizarre that you might judge a life partner by their ability to pass tests in school curricula, especially in a culture where that statistically means you are much more likely to be a cheat! That said, in a society where we don't know everyone, we do need reliable means of recognizing both competence and incompetence in an individual for a particular role. It's just that it would be better if a) the grades signalled actual competence and b) they did not interfere with the educational process.

Thanks Jon

I always keep getting confused if the glass is half empty or half full. You clarify things in this instance.  - we still have half a glass!!

Terry