By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Definitions: ABCD Objectives
I didn't want to link to this, but I did want to comment. However, blogger.com is once again down for the count (I converted my Blogger account to a Google account, which runs on beta.blogger.com - but the sad and sorry way the company is treating blogger.com customers should be a matter for company-wide embarrassment). What I was going to comment was that this short guide reads like it could come out of B.F. Skinner, and to question whether this was an appropriate foundation for the design of learning materials. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open-Of-Course
Another startup: "Open-Of-Course is a multilingual portal for free online courses and tutorials. By 'free' we not only mean free as in 'free beer' but also published as open content." The right idea - but when will these form a network, rather than merely focusing on individual sites? But hey, I'm cheering for the open educational content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 10 News Events of The Edublog Year
Dave Cormier's version of the list. You'll find more listed over at Learning Circuits's Big Question. Also see Edward T. Simpson on EDUCAUSE. Before undertaking any such exercise, if I do, I will wait until the year actually comes close to being finished. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Identity Management
The educational technology community has still not come to grips with the question of identity and identification, Shibboleth notwithstanding. The perspective typically seems to be the matter of access control and authentication. But there is no user demand for limited access rights and demands that they prove who they are. Unless identification does something of worth to the user, there will be no demand for it. Moreover, there needs to be some recognition that user data, including personal information and access information, is in a certain sense the property of the user. I wouldn't want to (as this author suggests) emulate the system of credit reporting agencies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educators Explore 'Second Life' Online
See, here's part of what I don't get. You couldn't buy space on CNN to note the use of more generic technologies in learning. I don't recall any media push behind, say, the use of MUDs in e-learning, blogs in e-learning. Or mailing lists, or even things like Flickr or del.icio.us. So how does Second Life rate such coverage? I still think that what really distinguishes Second Life from other technology is its marketing, the very big push it's getting from mainstream media. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. phpMyID
This (or something like this) is the future for online identification. This page is a stand-alone instance of OpenID, implemented in PHP, which means (in theory) you could put this on your website and then use it to log into compliant websites. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution
Roger Schank asks for the evidence that the math we teach is foundational and needed by high school graduates. "I always start any discussion on education by asking if the person I am talking with knows the quadratic formula. One out of hundred knows it" (me, I know what it is, but I'd have to look it up, not having used it in 30 years of frequently technical work). Schank says simply, "Lets get serious. We don't need more math and science. We need more people who can think. We need to teach job skills, people skills, and reasoning skills. And we need to make education exciting and interesting. We need performance tests not competence tests." the thing is, these things are pretty obvious - why is it such a hard sell. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Basics: Your Office on the Web
How to crank up your internet (not just tubes any more!). First, change your start page (oddly, 80 percent of internet users never do). Pick a content page like NetVibes and then fill it with content. Add some widgets and some feeds to RSS contents. Then cue in some personal organization tools, like Google Calendar and Orchestrate (a personal to-do list). Create an address book (don't use Plaxo, it spams your contacts). Connect to Flickr for your photos (and I would suggest Slideshare for your slides). And while you're at it, set up a display to view other people's photos - something nice every day. Get set up on Google spreadsheets and documents, so you've got some serious content capacity. More...