By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Researcher FlightPlan, [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
I've been enjoying the good-natured back and forth between proponents of the eprints and DSpace repository systems on the JISC mailing list recently. This item maps conferences to flight plans on Google maps (eprints). This thing is a way to map archive contents to history timelines - nifty examples from the history of Christianity and the age of dinosaurs (DSpace). Here is a search bounded by geographical coordinates. (DSpace) Meanwhile, this is a fabulous mapping of aboriginal artifacts in northern Australia (Kakadu! - one of my favorite places) - note that you may have to move the map a bit to see them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Poonam Khanna[Edit][Delete]: Canadian Book Publishers Adopt System to Manage Digital Files, IT Business [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
Some institutions are outsourcing publications management. This is interesting (especially in light of yesterday's rant about libraries) because it's a function the university library ought to be doing, or the university publisher ought to be doing, but is instead being outsourced to a third party. It's all PDF, which means DRM is involved in there somewhere, too, instead of simply enabling open access. As though people are breaking down walls trying to get at UBC publications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Derek Wenmoth[Edit][Delete]: The End of Education, November 17, 2006
This is right: "The real changes that the computer is bringing about - changes in the way we see reality - remain invisible." And it reminds me of this (and I think it's a crime we can't get full-text James Baldwin online): "The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Arrington[Edit][Delete]: Huh? YouTube Sends TechCrunch a Cease and Desist, Techcrunch [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
Hm. YouTube has sent TechCrunch a cease-and-desist letter because TechCrunch was distributing a way for people to save YouTube videos. According to YouTube's lawyer, "YouTube is a streaming-only service. We do not permit users to download the videos we host on our site." Well, this is totally not clear when you upload. And it really erodes the value of the site. Is this because of Google, I wonder. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Daniel Terdiman[Edit][Delete]: Second Life Faces Threat to its Virtual Economy, CNet News.Com [Edit][Delete]CNET News.com [Edit][Delete]CNet News.com [Edit][Delete]CNet news.Com [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
Funny. A program called 'copybot', which allows users to duplicate anything in Second Life, is threatening to cause a crash in the Second Life economy. I want to see it clone 'Berkman Island', and then set the two Berkmans' public relations agencies against each other. Andrew Raff offers much more analysis and links. "Second Life could be a veritable utopia, where goods spring forth without effort, but that would change the fundamental nature of the Linden economy and at the very least lead to rampant inflation, if not a complete devaluation of the Linden dollar. And it would prove disastrous to Second Life landowners and merchants who have invested time and money in the universe." Yeah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Blockchain Ready for Prime Time in Education?
Wayne Skipper, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/02/04
The lede is buried near the end of this post: "In early 2018, Concentric Sky and partners BrightHive and the DXtera Institute proposed such a blockchain ecosystem, called EdRec. EdRec is a learner-centric, open standards approach to learning record storage 'on the blockchain,' with self-sovereignty of learner data as its key design principle." What I've l.earned over the last year is that while it's relatively easy to store information in a blockchain, maintaining it as a network is generates wider social and technical issues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Education in Chile: small steps in an adverse context
Werner Westermann, Carlos Ruz, Open Education Working Group, 2019/02/04
Several things are happening at once in this article as the new Open University of Recoleta is at once embarking on an institutional policy based on Open Educational Resources, and at the same time, as an "informal institution", pioneering the concept of the  “Pluriversity”, which they say "is similar to the concept of Volkshochschule in Germany, where the idea of popular universities is widely adopted and well regarded." The bulk of the article highlights the barriers against adopting open education in Chile. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Senior citizens hold more student debt: a Wall Street Journal report
Bryan Alexander, 2019/02/04
You won't be able to access this Wall Street Journal report unless you've paid for a subscription, but this post from Bryan Alexander will do the job just fine. Here's the gist: " American senior citizens are holding a growing amount of student loan debt." There are numbers and statistics showing the student debt held by people in their golden years remains in the billions of dollars. To put the issue in local context here in Ontario, about 40% of students qualified for free-tuition grants to low-income students under a program recently cancelled by the provincial government. Now these students will carry this cost as student debt after they graduate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine[Edit][Delete]: [NMC Regional] The Br[yI]an Double Header, Cogdogblog [Edit][Delete]CogDogBlog [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
Coverage of the NMC conference complete with a link to a 105 slide deck on storytelling (and a lot more) from Bryan Alexander and some video mashups from Brian Lamb. By the time you read this, one of them or the other will have audio on their website. As I read through this and looked at the photos of Brian Lamb, with the computers and the headphones and the tech, I realized, we are living the science fiction I read about when I read it as a kid. My reading of science fiction (a lot of science fiction, thousands of books) shaped my ambitions, and while I thought I went off track with philosophy and distance education and all that, here I am. More...