By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Elizabeth Redden[Edit][Delete]: The Engaged E-Learner, Inside Higher Ed [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
This year's the Community College Survey of Student Engagement shows that "e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers." According to the author, these results are prompting calls for individual institutions to release their data. For those people who insist on publishing surveys of 30 students, not that this study is "is based on data from 260,000 randomly-selected first-year and senior students at 523 four-year institutions." This is an empirical study. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Martin LaMonica[Edit][Delete]: Sun Picks GPL License for Java Code, Zdnet [Edit][Delete]ZDNet [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
Sun has finally agreed to license Java under GPL, the open source license used by Linux. This doesn't change my views about Java, which I still think is ridiculously over-engineered. But it means that maybe some decent Java applications will be written. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Arthur Sale[Edit][Delete]: The Patchwork Mandate, School of Computing, Australia [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
I still find this the most amazing this: "In the absence of mandates, every encouragement policy known to Man fails to convince more than 15% to 20% of researchers to invest the 5 minutes of time needed to deposit their publications." Hence the author's recommendation that, in the absence of an institutional mandate, advocates should seek departmental mandates - the 'patchwork' mandate. Reasonable enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John Markoff[Edit][Delete]: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense, New York Times [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
It was inevitable that there would be an attempt to define Web 3.0 and I guess in retrospect it is only mildly surprising that the redefinition comes from the business community and is a rehash of the orchestrated services promised in internet bubble versions of the Semantic Web. The latest is in this New York Times article (which in a very Web 1.0 manner will disappear from circulation in a few days). But here's the same story, more or less, from Zeldman last January. Here's a ZDNet article citing Tim Berners-Lee, no less, from last November, saying the same thing. Or here. Or here. Or here. Really, what we are getting is no advance over current thinking. Don't buy into it - yes, there will be a 'next generation' web, probably in about five years (which means we'll see early traces in two or three years). It probably won't be called 'Web 3.0'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mary Meeker[Edit][Delete]: The State of the Internet, Part 3, Web 2.0 Conference [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
If there was any doubt that this has been the year of video, this presentation my Morgan-Stanley's Mary Meeker removes any doubt. But as you see by the end of the presentation, it is community, user-generated content (UGC) and personalization that will be key to the future of the web as peer-to-peer video exchanges chew up bandwidth without otherwise generating any revenues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Darren Kuropatwa[Edit][Delete]: Networks are Groups, A Difference [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
Darren Kuropatwa argue that there is no distinction between networks and groups. "The edublogging community is a group of people with a common profession that have certain attitudes and interests in common," he writes. "Ultimately, we are all interested in the same thing: improving the education of the children in our lives." That common interest would make it a group, were it the case. But it is not a common interest (many of the people I have worked with are adult educators, others are primarily technologists, and many are interested in 'learning' but not 'education'). That sort of proclamation of 'a common interest' is just the sort of thing I have been trying to guard people against. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peter Shanks[Edit][Delete]: ICA05 Deconstructed, Bathurst TAFE [Edit][Delete] November 10, 2006
What I like about this is the way a group of people on the outside show how its done. The focus is the (Australian) ICA05 training package, currently available only as a PDF. The author writes, "I don't have much time for searching through two 600 page PDF documents, cutting and pasting and re-formatting units, and wondered why this information wasn't availiable as a database or an XML file... Well... I had a couple of spare days so I kludged together some code that read the original PDF documents and fed the results into a database... Why stop there? How about: auto-generating moodle module skeletons". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Robert H. McDonald and Chuck Thomas[Edit][Delete]: Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values, EDUCAUSE Quarterly [Edit][Delete] November 10, 2006
When you say something like this, you know it's not going to be a positive report: "accommodating changing user preferences is not the only priority that drives library decisions." This article identifies the disconnect between libraries and new technologies across three domains: technology, policy and opportunity. In particular, it is worth noting that "services and policies are equally limiting, seemingly guided more by fear of litigation than any other factor". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Wegner[Edit][Delete]: Networks Of Expertise, Teaching Generation Z [Edit][Delete] November 9, 2006
Discussion of the concept of community in relation to some of the recent discussions of groups and networks. A community is one of those things that can go either way, in my view - it can be a network of people living in the same place or doing the same thing, or it can become a group, define boundaries, and stress sameness and leadership. More...