By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Banning MySpace--at Home
"St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School students were informed recently that under a new school policy, Think First, Stay Safe, the use of MySpace.com will be prohibited at school and at home." Yeah, you read it right. Apparently, it's not enough to ban MySpace at school. Which moves the issue beyond education and into the realm of thought control. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Have Met the Enemy and It Is Tribalism
I have no email right now.
Many of this year's themes have revolved around this idea, from my criticisms of groups to my criticisms of corporations. Jon Udell says, "Tribalism is an aspect of human nature, so it must once have served a purpose, but it no longer does. It's a piece of evolutionary baggage that we can no longer afford to carry around. I don't know if we can let go of it, but we had better at least try." Something like that is true. It's not the only problem, but it's a big one.
Anyhow. Edu-RSS and Learning Networks represent by attempt to define some sort of mechanism for community other than what is here being called tribalism. We need an alternative. I am trying on one hand to define it conceptually, and on the other to define it technologically. I've been rewriting the code over the last couple of weeks (since my vacation). It's almost ready (I am also applying to NRC to open source it - I have verbal approval - but apparently there's a form...). Anyhow, today I made a small change and rebooted my web server - which then ceased to function. Not sure what happened. Anyhow, the site is back, but all my email functions have been knocked out of commission. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. VON Spiel: It'S Our TV
I frequently disagree with Jeff Jarvis, as he comes from some place where advertising is good and online media is all about business. But he also picks up technology trends really well and sees through to the essence of the thing. As in, for example, this post. "We are taking over TV," he writes. "We are reinventing TV... And this means we have a great opportunity to reinvent TV from scratch..." How? Well, this is where we disagree: "Blogs didn't do it right. Not the economic side of the equation. We bloggers make it extremely difficult for advertisers to love us..." Seems to me, that's exactly what we did get right. Advertising (even if spread through the long tail) is a mass phenomeon - it is about privileged messages exerting unearned influence through the network. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How I Became A Music Pirate
A common message, well stated. "Does DRM drive even honest well-meaning people to piracy? Yes, of course it does." In particular, in this case, the author tries to purchase music with Windows DRM. This is designed to prevent it from ever playing on an iPod. It also prevents it from ever being played on his own computer, or even on a CD-ROM. "Call it piracy. Call it whatever you want. But at least I tried. I gave you several chances and you failed miserably at every level". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EduSpaces
Elgg has become EduSpaces. This has been in the works for a few weeks, but the official emails have landed in my in-box (I have a couple Elgg accounts). The URL has changed (from elgg.net to eduspaces.net), but the old URL still works. Not everything has changed over yet, including the big message on the front page that says "You can join up, learn more about Elgg here or create your own social network instantly at Elgg Spaces." The designers should also implement RSS Autodiscovery - they are about the only personal publishing provider that doesn't. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Allegations From an Industry "Expert"
Richard Nantel, a Brandon Hall blogger who was missed in Tony Karrer's summary yesterday (and consequently in my list, which simply repeated his), writes in defense of his organization against an unnamed "expert" who writes that their "'researched based' reports... rely heavily of donations and payments from the platforms they 'research'." I tried to find the author of the quote, however, the discussion list is not indexed by Google. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies: A Survey
UNESCO report (PDF) constituting an overview of ethical implications of new technologies, including things like the semantic web, identify management, RFID, and more. Taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a point of departure, the document does not delve deeply into any given issue but merely serves to outline the scope (as such it would be a good document for in-class discussions). In the end, the recommendation is to form a UNESCO advisory committee on the ethical implications of emerging technologies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 24 Hours to Secure Collaboration On Interoperability
The unedited plain-text version of the report on the meeting about LETSI - the body that will take over control of SCORM - that took place in London a couple of days ago. The final version will appear in the April ALT newsletter. "The first panel, with speakers from ISO/IEC, IMS Global, Microsoft UK and Ariadne, discussed global governance of interoperability. The common thread was the inter-connection of design and engineering. This meant a tension (although at times creative) between teachers (who 'don't need to know that they are using SCORM') and the design of learning, and technologists. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Semantic Web Will Fail
So I was just getting ready for bed last night when a thought came to me. So I popped into Blogger and spent ten minutes writing the post. Maybe I should have given it a different title - but sheesh, someone has to say it. Here is the central idea: "The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating." Readers might not like the examples that were top-of-mind last night (or my peeved state about Yahoo killing my Flickr account) but readers of this newsletter have over the last seven years seen an unending list of examples. Well, today I've been getting comments all day and - incredibly - I have, for the first time in my life, been Slashdotted. Go figure. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour March 21, 2007 [Link]. More...