By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life: 20 Lessons
Interesting presentation that not only sketches the role of Second Life in learning but also maps it against a dozen or so other sites for features such as players' creative capacity or the site's emphasis on collaborative behaviour. Good links on this. There's a bit of a tendency to represent Second Life as the pinnacle of online virtual world achievement, but the observations are nonetheless worth a look. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Announcing Freefolio - a Social E-Portfolio
Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink have created and release, as open source, Freefolio, an e-portfolio system. "Why didn't we work with an existing system? We thought very hard about it. It seemed that many of the dedicated e-Portfolio systems were too restrictive. They started from an institutional definitions of what learning would be represents through the e-Portfolio". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills
Robin Good has a real talent for taking a dull plain-text piece of content and presenting it in a way that is engaging and educational (when he's done some of my stuff in the past I've seen things in my own thought that I hadn't before). In this item, he takes the keynote presentation that Howard Rheingold delivered a couple of weeks ago to education.au and gives us a nice two-part version that is well worth looking at (I can't find Part II). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OECD On Learning Networks
So the Red Hat up2date feature kicked in and knocked out my website, disabling all CGI functions with a security update to Perl. So that's how I spent my day. I would rather have had the chance to look more closely at the diagram from this post on OECD's description of learning networks (if only to have something 'official' to point my management to when I say I'm working on 'learning networks'). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenSocial Opens New Can of Worms
I can't even begin to describe the chaos on the discussion lists following the release of OpenSocial. To put it in a nutshell: it's a way for people to write applications that will play inside social networks like Orkut. But it is not a mechanism for a single-signon or any of the distributed social network features people have been looking for. Anyhow, there's a lot of coverage, highlights of which follow. This item looks at Google SocialStream. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Review of Learning Objects, A Moving Target
Without going headlong down the learning objects pathway, let me suggest this: "And, one key property is a Learning Object's ability to fully identify itself. Thereby, any object (or person) can send a message, 'What are you; what functionality do you have, how do we relate?'" This is a view that depicts learning objects as programs, and not content. Now - just for fun - take this view and compare it to OpenSocial, just below. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ed Tech Conferences 2007 - 2008
Clayton Wright has released a new version of his conference listings, which I have posted on my site. This version covers conferences from November, 2007, through 2008. MS-Word document. In his email, he adds "A couple of minor observations: there are more events in China than previously and a few of the international conferences have moved around the calendar, i.e., an event normally held in July is now being held in February". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
Very detailed survey from six western nations on internet use, privacy, security and trust. Sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center. Use of almost everything is up from 2005, including blogs (to 46 percent, from 16 percent) and even email (to 97 percent, from 73 percent). Only library web sites are down (to 20 percent, from 30 percent). (page 1-2). Security and privacy concerns are not surprising: "The highest privacy concerns were of two types: advertising/spam and identity theft/protecting personal information." (page 3-7) Most of us share quite a bit of information online, but we also want to be able to determine who sees it and who uses it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication: A Call for Community Engagement
Personally, I think this comes very late in the day, but I think it's good to see the library community looking seriously at changes to scholarly communication. After all, the old system - where we take all our material, give it to publishers, then buy it back for ever more inflated prices - is pretty much dead. I don't know about a "research agenda" - that's the old model of 'coordinated and targeted action', which generally serves the interests of one minority view or another. But all of that said, the questions, at least, are being asked: how is cyberinfrastructure money being spent? How do virtual organizations differ from those more traditional. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. TrustDR - Trust in Digital Repositories
"This institutional development pack for managing IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) in e-learning is intended to support those who wish to update and clarify their institutional policies and infrastructures to help get the best out of using technology to support teaching and learning." This really is everything someone in an institutional context could want on the question of rights in digital repositories. A comprehensive set of resources. More...