By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Avoid Sounding Like an Monkey
So is it a 'socal graph' or a 'social network'? Some of the recent work in the field has started to talk about the 'social graph'. But as Dave Winer - correctly - points out, the term means (basically) exactly the same thing as 'social network'. With the advantage that people have heard of it. More discussion of this at Nick Carr's website. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Piggy Bank
Google has a mashup editor. Microsoft has a mashup editor. Yahoo has a mashup editor. And then there's Piggy bank, which is open source. "Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook
The question is not only, can Facebook survive its new mass popularity, but also, can we survive Facebook? Canadians, especially, have taken to the site. "If, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, then perhaps we Canadians are being changed by simply using the site as frequently and intensely as we have been in recent months." I'm not worried. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning 2.0 in Development
I'm going to keep today's newsletter short as I have just finished my talk from this morning and have nother session this afternoon. This is the link to the slides from my talk today at the Brandon Hall conference. I have audio, but it's locked in a Windows-only recording device. The conference has a Technorati tag, a Flickr group and a Twitter tag. janet Clarey has a short comment from the talk; so does Harold Jarche. Stephen Downes, Slideshare September 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Audio, Newsletters, E-Learning 2.0, Microsoft, Flickr, Technorati]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has taken the long expected step of making the XO computers available to consumers under a program that allows people to buy one for themselves while funding the purchase of one for a developing nation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Education - Week 4: Overall Reflections On Weeks 2, 3 and 4
Good post discussing the concept of instruction with respect to open educational resources. The idea (following Gagne) is that "Information which does not include presentation, practice, and learner guidance is information but not instruction." Maddrell looks at the three:
# Presentation - when the thoughts and ideas presented from over 300 edubloggers wind up in my feed reader,
# Practice - when I reflect on the thoughts and ideas of others within my own blog (dare I say, my PLE), and
# Feedback - when I read, receive and participate in the back and forth comments and counter-posts among bloggers help guide my understanding.
The thing is, this still propagates the old notion that the 'instruction' is in the resource. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Organisational Learning Today - Concept Map
Interesting diagram summarizing 'organizational learning'. The term, of course, is a misnomer - it is the people who are in the organizations that are learning. So what's the 'organizational' doing in there? Sections like culture' and 'performance standards' give us an idea. Perhaps we should call it 'managed learning'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture
I spent time this morning listening to this lecture (when I should have been preparing for my own talk - well, OK, I was preparing for my own talk, but I kept getting distracted by this lecture). You can view it on YouTube starting here. You can read these reflections after. And maybe this post from Curtis Bonk. Via several sources, including this post from Leonard Low. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. San Jose

I'm in Santa Clara for the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference getting ready for my talk tomorrow and setting up my conference backchannel script. The photo is of the fountain in front of San Jose city hall. Stephen Downes, Flickr September 24, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Silicon Valley, Flickr]. More...