By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. More Signal, Less Noise: The Power of RSS Mashups
I've talked a lot aout RSS over the years and we have finally reached the point where there is wide adoption - and adaptation - of the format. This article does the service of comparing some of the key systems launched since the inception of Yahoo Pipes, and offering some telling points. Such as the observation that there is no output function in Microsoft Popfly - you do all that work, but you can't create an RSS feed with it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Really Happened at SUNY
Michael Feldstein describes 'what really happened at SUNY' in response to a post suggesting that the university "they insisted that the 'future is now' and ultimately ran out of steam and 'lived in the present' and went with Angel." Felstein responds, "the real barriers to an LMOS approach are not technical but political." Me, I'd prefer to hear the "gory details". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenLearn Remix Competition
Personally I think every issue of OLDaily is a remix - but even though I probably won 't win the prize I'm still inclined to pass on word of this competition, if only because I want to see the very best of the remixes assembled in one (easy to find) place. Ah... but wait. you have to use OU's OpenLearn materials. Why, this contest is just a publicity stunt! Just kidding - but it would be interesting to see a non-brand-specific remix contest. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning Environments Are Also Social...
I listened to David Vincent, the Open University pro-Vice-Chancellor, speak of the university's work on PLEs this morning in Heerlen. This post adds some background, especially in light of Vincent's describing the PLE as serving "social needs" (or "social values", as opposed to "public" and "institutional" needs and values). Hirst writes,"I do think that there are containers - or frameworks - that allow a range of personal and social tools" - and I guess OU is developing one - "as well as information feeds and storage, to be collected together in some way (via linking or embedding) to offer the user a single 'place to go' to access these tools; a (personal) learning workspace, if you like". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OERs in Sustainable Perspective
The Slideshare version of the talk I gave yesterday at the SCOP 2007 conference here in Heerlen. There is audio - well, 24 minutes of audio, which is now the battery life of my iRiver (sigh - another MP3 player bites the dust - and they expect me to pay for all those songs again? get real) - which will be posted later this week. Due to a scheduling glitch I only had an hour to prepare for the talk, so I don't have all the nice pictures I would normally have. This is my second time in Heerlen - I'm staying at the same hotel, even sitting in the same chair. It's hard not to have a sense of deja vu, and I have fond memories of the last time I was here. But that feels like a lifetime ago, too, part of a different world, a different version of myself.
I fly back home tomorrow - so no guarantees on a newsletter. Home for two or three days, then it's off to Taiwan. Stephen Downes, Slideshare June 4, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Newsletters, Audio]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Authors at Google: Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow talks about copyright to Google. Worth a view. Google, meanwhile, is launching Gears, an open source version of its productivity applications you can run on your own computer, without being online. Take that Microsoft! Doctorow writes, "I talked about how US trade policy had driven the US to abandon the tech sector and all the enterprises it supports in favor of a doomed plan to replace American industry with Police Academy sequels and Happy Meal toys. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understandable Hypocrisy
I need to reserve some time for a longer response to Paul Capon's response to my criticisms of the CCL report. But for now, as a reaction to the methodology employed by the report (and endorsed my various EU and OECD organizations) I offer, as an outline, this post. It is a summary - an all-to-brief and possibly incomplete summary - of the sorts of errors these organizations make. My difficulty - and I easily confess it here - is that in such matters the scientific converges with the political. It is difficult to criticize such a report without seeming political even if the criticisms are exclusively scientific; and this is compounded is the bases for the methodology employed in the report are in fact political. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. More OpenID, Free Will Discussions
A good back-and-forth about the relation between OpenID - and especially government or corporate issued OpenID - and personal choice and freedom. Specifically, writes the interlocutor, "I do sustain that issuing OpenIDs without asking takes away my freedom of choice." Not so. Issuing them and requiring that they be used takes away freedom of choice. If AOL prevents me from using my non-AOL OpenID, it takes away freedom of choice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The No. 1 Graduate School of Education?
Without a whole lot of fanfare, online institutions like Capella University and Nova Southeastern have taken over the lead role in the production of education PhDs, easily outdistancing the Teachers College at Columbia University and other traditional institutions with large programs. Which goes mostly to show, I would say, that online learning scales where traditional learning doesn't. People, of course, will just assume that the method that products he fewest graduates will produce the highest quality; eventually, their quirks will be taken as definitive of higher quality, the way flaws in hand-woven fabrics denote higher quality in textiles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning Knowledge Work Environment
Karyn Romeis coins the term 'lifewide learning' to capture the idea expressed in this post, that "I consider my office, my television set, my university classes, team development days, conversations with my far cleverer colleagues (both on and offline) to be a part of my PLE." For Tony Karrer, focused more on work than on life (why the separation between being a knowledge worker and being a weekend spelunker?) the idea becomes that "there should be no separation between my Personal Learning Environment (PLE), my Personal Knowledge Management system, and my day-to-day set of tools that enhance my knowledge worker productivity". More...