Ever Higher Society, Ever Harder to Ascend
While the bulk of this article discusses inequality and social mobility in general, some comments are reserved for higher education specifically. "America's engines of upward mobility are no longer working as effectively as they once were. The most obvious example lies in the education system... The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries..." This problem is not restricted to the United States. More...

oishii
David Wiley created a nifty little tool over the holidays, a script that grabs popular links in del.icio.us and wraps them in an RSS feed. Written in Python, which (thanks to my holiday project) I can now read. More...

FormTextResizer: Bookmarklet for Resizing Textareas and Text Fields
Very nice. "You know when you're typing an essay into someone else's blog comment form... and you run out of form field space?" Yeah. Especially on Blogger. More...

Good Riddance To DOPA
The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) is history, and just as well, because it would also have deleted bloggers, discussion forums, wikis, and more, at least in the United States. More...

'UCLA to Adopt Moodle
The headline says it all. Wonder how they're feeling these days in Blackboardland. And they can't even steal RSS! Microsoft has beat them to it. More...

'Single sign-on' Moves a Step Closer
First the announcement: "JISC and Becta recently announced the launch of the UK Access Management Federation, bringing a 'single sign-on' to network and online resources a step closer." Now the criticism: in what sense is this single sign-on? People have to sign on to Google, Yahoo, various blogs, discussion lists, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and much more. More...

Happy New Year
I am home from Ottawa. This year I will spend New Year's Eve in a comedy club.
2006 was a year of extremes for me. It was a difficult year, but only because it was one where I tried to live my life to the fullest, and I guess I can't regret that. I made memories to last a lifetime, I touched so many places and so many lives, and was more than rewarded in kind.
I dreamed last night that I was given a fine suit, a thousand dollar suit that I would never buy for myself, with a silk scarf and a long overcoat, that when I wore it I looked like and felt like I had found my success in this life. I trimmed my hair, just a bit, to match the suit, and when I walked down the road, I strode forward with a flourish, waving the tail of my coat behind me.
Kia ora. Thank you, to all of you, and best wishes for the coming year. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web December 29, 2006 [Link] [Comment]. More...

The Real Story On Harvard's Generosity
I have in the past predicted that there will be increasing political pressure on universities. In this item we see criticism of Harvard's tax-free status as its endowment grows by billions of dollars each year. More...

2008: Year of Information Overload?
This is a prediction that has gotten some traction in the blogosphere, but as George Siemens comments, "ok, and the last ten years were what?" Perhaps we'll hear more about intelligent software agents and data visualization, but I really don't expect either to make great strides forward in 2008. More...

Pew On Teen Social Media Practices (with Interesting Bits On Class)
Social media critic danah boyd comments on the recent Pew study on internet use (I wish Pew would expand its horizons and look beyond U.S. borders - there's some weird political agenda here that I don't like). More...