By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Hoffman[Edit][Delete]: Dopa Fixed Me, All Right, ESchool News [Edit][Delete] May 15, 2006

[link: 8 Hits] A couple items from Tom Hoffman on the U.S. legislation, called DOPA, to restrict access to social networking sites. In the first item, Hoffman (correctly) identifies it as "fear mongering" and agrees that it probably won't go very far. Still, he also says he has "always been surprised that people felt that having students use Blogger or Flickr would really be viable on a large scale" because "These concerns about privacy, stalking, etc. have been around as long as the web has been in schools." Yes, there are concerns, but are they based in anything like reality. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Joan Vinall-Cox[Edit][Delete]: Reading is Visual, Learning Landscape [Edit][Delete] May 15, 2006
I had the pleasure of meeting Susan E. Metros in Tennessee (see my pictures from Murfreesboro and Nashville), where she presented much the same material summarized in her EDUCAUSE article on visual literacy. To me, the idea that there is a visual design vocabulary suggests that we have non-symbolic ways of knowing, something that resonates with my thoughts about a new literacy. In this item, Joan Vinall-Cox observes, "After all, reading is a visual act, tied to visual perception. We judge a piece of writing initially, before we decode even one word, by what it looks like. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Hillsborough, NB, May 15, 2006

Photos from my bicycle trip to Hillsborough. What do you think - should I use Flickr, like I do here, or use my own photo gallery, to present photos? [Tags: Flickr] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Phil Haack[Edit][Delete]: An Developer's Introduction to Microformats, DevSource [Edit][Delete] May 12, 2006
A good general introduction to microformats; don't let the title prevent you from looking. Microformats are "a set of open data formats used to mark up XHTML content to provide a bit of semantic meaning." Think of them as though they were XML tags embedded directly into a web page, instead of in a separate XML file. The idea is that this mark-up, usually very specific to a bit of information, can be mixed and matched with other bits of information. "Microformats already have a very specific task in mind when created and build upon prior work. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michel Serres: Revisiting The Natural Contract, CTheory May 12, 2006

I don't think you should necessarily accept the argument presented in this paper, but it is work considering the reconceptualization of some of our typical frames that is offered by the author. The idea, in a nutshell, is to include the object - that is, for example, the world around us - as a signatory in the social contract. How does the object participate? As in, for example, the Goya painting: "A pair of enemies are fighting in quicksand... the game is no longer played by two parties, but by three; no longer two subjects, but a pair and the object. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Terry Mockler[Edit][Delete]: Blogging as Pedagogic Practice, May 12, 2006
Good article, but it will leave you pleading for paragraphs or any other sort of text formatting. "We need to look at blogging, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a broad palette of 'cybercultural' practices, which provide us with both new ways of doing and new ways of thinking... Unlike other tools that support conversations, weblogs provide their authors with a personal space simultaneously with a community space". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jason Kottke[Edit][Delete]: Creating Talent, Kottke.org [Edit][Delete] May 12, 2006
I saw the Brain Trainer mentioned somewhere a few weeks ago, but haven't seen a link until now. I find this phenomenon - the widespread popularity of a 'game' that is intended to help you become smarter - very interesting. The popularity itself belies the claims of those who assert that people will not make good choices when given the opportunity to improve, or not improve, their education. The other thing that interests me is the assertion that "people who are good at things got good at them primarily through practice and not because of innate talent." This again sounds right to me. What does it take to learn? Practice and reflection. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pamela Slim: Open Letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs Across the Corporate World, Escape From Cubicle Nation May 11, 2006
This article has gained some traction in the blogosphere and resonates as well in the educational world. The message is simple: this consultant (Pamela Slim) has given up trying to teach good practice to corporate management, and is now trying to teach their employees how to escape. She writes, "I was banging my head against the wall trying to find ethical, creative ways to train your employees on the merits of your forced ranking compensation plan. No amount of creativity could overcome the fact that it is a stupid idea..." She wraps up the column with some really fundamental (but so often ignored) advice for corporate management. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Miltiadis D. Lytras, editor[Edit][Delete]: Semantic Web Factbook, SIGSEMIS [Edit][Delete] May 11, 2006
Hard to believe, but this is only the preliminary (abridged) edition. This 115 page PDF will overwhelm you with country reports (especially China, Ukraine and Poland), project reports and papers. Some of the interesting projects described include SemDis (discovering complex relationships in semantic data) and REWERSE (reasoning on the web with rules). The volume contains as a whole hundreds of links and references. It's almost too much, really - my preference would be to see similar information distributed once a day or once a week, spread out to give readers time to absorb it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Charles Bailey[Edit][Delete]: Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?, DigitalKoans [Edit][Delete] May 11, 2006
Essay that is mostly an overview of the three issues listed in the title (Strong Copyright, DRM and Net Neutrality) with some discussion of their impact on libraries in the last section. The conclusion, as the title suggests, is that these three things would be bad for libraries. "What may be every publisher/vendor's dream, may be every library's nightmare. More...