Personvern er en grunnleggende verdi i et demokrati. Personvernet innebærer en rett til å være i fred fra andre, men også en rett til å ha kontroll over opplysninger om seg selv, særlig opplysninger som oppleves som personlige. Etter EMK artikkel 8 er personvern ansett som en menneskerettighet.

Med en mulig norsk implementering av Datalagringsdirektivet (direktiv 2006/24/EF), som pålegger tele- og nettselskap å lagre trafikkdata om borgernes elektroniske kommunikasjon (e-post, sms, telefon, internett) i inntil to år, vil nordmenns personvern bli krenket på det groveste.

Datalagringsdirektivet ble vedtatt av EU 15.mars 2006, men fremdeles har Storinget ikke offisielt tatt stilling til om direktivet skal gjøre til norsk lov eller ikke. Gjennom EØS-avtalen har Norge en reservasjonsrett. Denne har aldri før blitt brukt, men så har man heller aldri stått overfor et direktiv som representerer en så stor trussel mot demokratiets grunnleggende verdier som det datalagringsdirektivet gjør.

Vi krever at samtlige politiske partier sier ifra nå før valget om de vil gjøre datalagringsdirektivet til norsk lov eller ikke. Å ikke ta stilling, slik som de fleste politiske partiene på Stortinget (med unntak av Venstre og SV) har gjort i over tre år, er det samme som stilltiende aksept.

De politiske partiene må ta stilling nå – si nei til datalagringsdirektivet!

(Gilse Hannemyr inspirerte meg til dette blogginnlegget)

Technorati Tags: datalagringdirektivet, #dld

And I have promised to be a more active blogger, from now on….

Have a look at Dino’s PDF og presentation of his work.

Technorati Tags: cetis-2007-conference-semantics

The LET community does not have a full understanding of what is needed in the different domains of learning, education and training. Using ontologies to describe the structure of a knowledge domain does not necessarily help learning if what is needed is support for negotiation of meaning about different knowledge structures.

The organisers have the following questions, to be answered by invited participants and presenters:

• What can currently be achieved with semantic technologies?
• What future developments are in the pipeline, and when are they likely to be realised?
• What are the technical or non-technical advantages to exploiting semantic technologies and what are the barriers to their adoption?
• What affordances can semantic technologies offer the domain of teaching and learning?
• How can we facilitate communication between semantic technology researchers and developers and educational technologists and practitioners?

i would appreciate comments and proposals for improvements to my draft position paper. You could also read the other papers at the Conference website.

Technorati Tags: cetis-2007-conference-semantics

Dette Dette var mitt første forsøk med å lydannotere et feriebilde fra Japan.

Educational Technology & Society is a quarterly journal published in January, April, July and October. Educational Technology & Society seeks academic articles on the issues affecting the developers of educational systems and educators who implement and manage such systems. The articles should discuss the perspectives of both communities and their relation to each other.

This sunk in, and the leader of the NSSL, Ola Berge, made this point of “explaining standards in a human understandable language” one of his three pivotal items summing up the advice NSSL got from the seminar.

Then why on earth did the Ministry coin the acronym NSSL in the first place? To start an acronym with the letters NS does not sound well i Norwegian ears in any place. And how human understandable is it for the educational community used to go to the hosting institution for NSSL, the Network for IT-Research and Competence in Education (ITU), to make sense of the acronym presented in the navigation bar of their site?

I happened to stumble across the E-LEN project, where two Norwegian universities are partners. The trajectory was my interest in Pattern Language as one of the boundary objects that could be used to bridge the gap (ref. the theme of my research interest at the moment). The Learning patterns for the design and deployment of mathematical games (part of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence) is doing a wonderful job here. There I found some references hosted at a Norwegian domain, and I download the leaflet of the project that has done a lot of work on design patterns and e-learning the last few years (the project finished in 2005). The leaflet states:

The aims of the project include (..) dissemination of design knowledge tailored to the needs of people who are professionally involved in e-learning, such as the staff of e-learning centres.

We use the term “e-learning centre” to describe a unit within a larger organisation (such as a university or a company) that has the role of helping the members of the organisation to create e-learning opportunities (courses, resources, learning communities, tools, etc.).

I work closely with a e-learning centre at a university. Have we heard about the E-LEN project? Don’t think so. How many universities are there in Norway? Less than 30, with two of them being part of the project consortium.

Well, in hindsight, it is my fault. I cannot blame anyone for not finding www2.tisip.no/E-LEN. I have found it now, and there are some good papers there that should reach a broader audience.

The first issue has these articles:

mGBL – mobile Game-Based Learning: perspectives and usage in learning and
career guidance topics
Cristina Cogoi, Daniele Sangiorgi and Kussai Shahin

Characteristics and Capacity of e-learning platforms for learning languages
(Summer 2006)
Sharon Monti Bonafede, Félix San Vicente and Vanio Preti

E-learning Development and Exchange: practical lessons from developing e-
language tools for support in lesser-used European languages
Ian Roffe

eLearning and higher education
Tapio Varis

User-defined content in a constructivist learning environment
Jean Johnson and Jonny Dyer

With authors in their first issue (eLearning Papers will be published every two months) from Italy, Finland and the UK and 19 EU languages, how do they approach the language problem. Well, every article will have an executive summary in 19 languages. The articles in full be available in their original language.

The themes of the articles of the first issue seems to address what interests the enlightened few. The actual quality? Well, then I have to read, not only browse.

For a person who has lived my whole working life by the pen, or rather by a typewriter and numerous generations of computers, it is a strong message to give up the most important tool for reflection, the language, to be able to go on as a reflecting practitioner. Having been a news journalist, an editor of professional journals, an information officer and a reflecting learner I have always written with particular audiences in mind. When I now pick up a tool I do not master and direct the beam of my blog into the empty sky I do not necessarily want a new audience. It’s just that I feel trapped by the audience I have got till now.

You do not need to read this blog. Hopefully, the coming blog posts, written in broken English will be so confusing that nobody will feel offended and have urgent needs to tell me what is appropriate to think and write. This blog is not written for you, but for me. I need to reify my thoughts to learn. And yes, I know learning is a social activity. But you do not need to participate, if you find what I write too controversial or political in a Norwegian context. By writing in English I will drift away from national questions and have no access to a language to express sarcasms. So you can delete your RSS feed now.

In the meantime I’ll will continue to talk to myself. If anyone out there should tune in, fine with me. As long as they do not want to mould me into their picture of what is rightful thinking. So get on with your own life. I have to figure out what to do with mine.