By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Posterous Is a Brilliant Blogging Tool
Posterous allows you to post to your blog using email. It also performs some nifty feats, such as converting photos included as attachments into a photo gallery (here's an example). Redirecting email to an application remains one of those things that it is tricky to do on your own with your own server, so Postereous performs a useful service. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndicated Web Ratings - an Idea Whose Time has Come?
This is a good idea that comes up from time to time (I mention it in my Resource Profiles paper). I doubt that we could ever have a standardized rating system (there will never be global agreement on 'accuracy' or 'family-friendliness') but ratings metadata can be pretty simply encoded. Here is a simple pseudo-schema (similar in many ways to the hreview microformat) that would do the job:
Rating:
- Item - item being rated (identified by URI)
- Scheme - rating scheme being used (eg., LDS family-friendliness scale)
- Field - field (eg. language use)
- Value - value (eg., 'mild profanity')
- Author - person doing the rating (identified by OpenID)
- Date - date reviewed Aggregating these provides you with a set of ratings on various resources. You can then assemble views (or 'profiles') of the resource, depending on what rating systems you use, what people you depend on for the ratings, etc. This is how we'll do it, eventually - it's just a matter of people collecting ratings and posting them as simple XML. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Believing in Education As Cure-All
Inassailable: "Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor's degrees." And if people are seeking to identify in a country's decreasing competitiveness a 'skills gap', it is worth reflecting that this gap is created by increasing inequity in the country, and that it is this increasing inequity that is the cause of a country's decreasing competitiveness. As Doug Noon says, "I and most teachers, I think, have long observed that many learning difficulties seemed to be linked to domestic home-life problems, and that there are a lot more of them than there used to be. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Category:Student-Generated Content
Links to a half dozen or so studies of practices at universities using student generated content. "The purpose of this collection is to showcase specific examples of how student-generated content can be used effectively in online education. In particular, this collection has focused on examples of student-generated content which represent a significant shift from students as content consumers to students as content producers." Wiki-based, so if you have your own example, you can add to the collection. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Predators and Cyberbullies: Reality Check
A sentence about halfway through says it all for me: "Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million "cases" of teen-to-teen cyberbullying." One wonders why the media is so interested in overemphasizing the former and almost completely ignoring the latter. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Impact of ICTs On Open and Distance Learning in a Developing Country Setting: The Philippine Experience
According to this article describing the use of ICTs to support e-learning in the Philippines, "it is not wise to use technology simply for technology sake, it must be 'relevant.' 'Relevance' in this case has two dimensions: the first is process and the second is substance." Cost (ie., access) and culture: it's the same thing in pretty much every article in the current IRRODL, in articles describing e-learning in Nepal and Bhutan, China, Cambodia, even Korea. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Informal Knowledge Transfer
Good account of the spread of informal learning in the corporate environment, with an emphasis on communities of practice. "To effectively leverage workplace trends, a new breed of technology is evolving from the principles of collective intelligence, which emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Time and time again, it has been proven that a large group of peers is more adept at solving complex problems than a small group of experts". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education'S Hidden Messages
Good statement of the "hidden messages" parents and students are learning from the education system. "They are leaning that discovering and creating knowledge is beyond the ability of students and is really none of their business." Scott McLeod, in a comment, notes, "Sociologist Phillip Jackson coined the phrase the hidden curriculum to describe the socialization process of schooling." I would argue that these messages are reinforced by other forms of media, and that it is in the interests of certain sectors of society (to the expense of everyone else) to promulgate these messages. More...