By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Derek Morrison[Edit][Delete]: Further Reflections on the Personal Learning Environment, Auricle [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
All Canadians have most of their medical expenses paid for by our system of public health care. So health is a sensitive issue in this country, because while Canadians strongly support their system, corporations and private interests try constantly to undermine it, to open it up to private enterprise. It is in this context that the electronic patient record (EPR) is discussed in Canada. I have been involved in some of those discussions, the tenor of which has varied from "there has to be room for profit in the EPR system" to "we're going to implement it no matter what the public thinks". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CoSN[Edit][Delete]: CoSN Launches Web Site to Illustrate Benefits of Open Technologies, Press Release [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
Co-sponsored by IMB and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, K12 Open Technologies is a site intended to "raise awareness among K-12 education technology decision makers about the use of open technologies." By 'open technologies' the sponsors mean "an umbrella term that includes open source software, open standards, and open hardware." Sounds good, though as Tom Hoffman cautions, 'open source' has a very specific meaning while 'open technologies' does not. "They should not co-opt the open source name for their own purposes, or dilute its meaning in the minds of educators," he writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Norm Friesen[Edit][Delete]: Communication Genres and the Mediatic Turn, Ipseity [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
I confess, my first reaction when I read the abstract of a new paper by Norm Friesen is usually, "oh, neat." So it is with this draft, in which he argues that it is increasingly important to employ mediatic terms - such as culture, genre, audience, or convention - when characterizing learning resources. I think he makes his case, but I'm not sure that his use of Altman's account of epistolarity is the way to go; I would have preferred to use more common and useful terms such as 'bridging', 'confessional' or 'reciprocal' forms of communication. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Steve Lee[Edit][Delete]: Freedback - a Way to Blog Product Feedback, Steve Lee : Weblog [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
This is a neat idea. Simply, include the phrase 'freedbacking product' in your post, where 'product' is the name of the product you want to review. Aggregators can then collect the resulting posts. Of course, right away we see people will use the term 'freedback' instead of 'freedbacking', which is no major problem. No, the major problem, of course, is 'freedback spam' (that's my contribution to the net lexicon for today). Or fake freedback ('phreedback' - ok, that's another lexicon item). But freedbacks from a social network or selected list of feeds (as in Edu_RSS) would be pretty handy and spam-free. Also: why restrict your freedback to products. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lisa Wise and James Quealy[Edit][Delete]: LMS Governance Final Report, Wise Word Press [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
Interesting and well-informed report considering what existing LMS governance models tell us and how this can be contrasted to alternative models described by e-learning 2.0. The difference may be seen in the differing use of language, which "represents a fundamental conceptual difference between (a) Elearning 2.0 practice around dynamic, interactive, adaptive, networked, online learning environments as infrastructure and (b) traditional elearning practice around static multimedia resources as content to be delivered online via an LMS, CMS or portal." These two models characterize differing epistemic models of organization, where the LMS characterizes "ordered ontology and rule-based epistemology", in contrast to "unordered ontology and heuristic-based epistemology". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laura Grant[Edit][Delete]: Open University Courseware Trend Comes to SA, tectonic [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
More good news on the open content front. "The University of the Western Cape (UWC) has made a policy decision to make its course material freely available over the Internet. This is believed to be a first for an African university. Material that will be made available includes courses, syllabuses, lecture notes and exam papers. More...