By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MySpace&a Drunken Pirate's Fate: A Cautionary Tale or Hint of Things to Come?
There's obviously more to this than what we see on the surface, but what we see on the surface is pretty disturbing: "A MySpace photo of a teacher education candidate, Ms. Snyder, wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic 'Mr. Goodbar' cup was reason enough for Millersville University (aka My'Ville) to deny her both an education degree and teaching certificate." She is accused of "promoting underage drinking." Which is ridiculous, of course, but she has obviously failed some sort of political purity test. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desire2Pod Cast 13: Nancy White
I haven't noticed Odeo audiocasts embedded in blog posts for a while (and had noticed that Odeo, which allows you to upload audio the way Flickr allows you to upload photos) was having read speed problems. This seems to be inversed - Flickr now seems to be throttling output (resulting in pages - that I see, at least - displaying only 6 thumbnail images out of a page of, say, 30) while Odeo seems to be loading smartly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Supreme Court Strikes a Major Blow for Patent Reform
This is very good news. In a nutshell, the Supreme Court has ruled that a broad and common-sense reading of the word 'obvious' should be used when considering whether a proposed patent is 'obvious'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wiki Pedagogy
OK, this is a completely new word for me: "palimpsests." Which means, "A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible." It sounds like a wiki, doesn't it? And that's exactly the context in which the word is used, in this very comprehensive discussion of how wikis can be used to support learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sizing Up the Opposition
Let me, at some risk, draw a connection between two separate threads. On the one hand, there is this series of posts discussing the creation of School 2.0 (or Education 2.0) groups on Ning. What is the motivation for this? there have been some emails flinging around - I haven't taken part in this exchange - where people are examining each other's motivations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. De-Schooling (or Re-Schooling) Society
I am feeling better but now hopelessly behind in my work with a flight to Bahrain looming. So, quickly: Graham Attwell expands on his deschooling remarks and comments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Saba to Acquire Enterprise Learning Vendor THINQ
The Learning Management System (LMS) marketplace has one fewer contender today as Saba signs an agreement to acquire Thinq in the third quarter of this year. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Futures Project to Close
The Futures Project, described as "a higher education policy think tank that has spent the last five years investigating the influences market-oriented, competitive pressures on higher education," has shut down as of yesterday. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Metadating Game
The idea here is that the data about one's life posted on blogs, sites like Flickr and Yahoo 360, and in personal XML like FOAFD can be used via an information aggregator to support a distributed match service. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. enCore Consortium
I've been sitting on this, hoping to install the software before commenting with a link, but being on vacatyion lends itself more to playing Civ III than to installing software. But it appears to my roots as a MUD designer and I have never let go of the idea that a multi-user environment like a MUD has a lot of potential in e-learning. Anyhow, the newly formed enCore Consortium is devoted to supporting the development of the enCore learning environment. More...