By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Commercial Success
I found this article on advertising on weblogs and especially on Yahoo! interesting. Worth noting though is that you need to attract a large circulation - about 30,000 page views a day, according to an ad agency that contacted me - before it really becomes viable. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?
"Creating metadata for text has gone from tedious to insignificant." If this isn't obvious, it should be. From where I sit, the text is the metadata - it describes itself. So where is metadata useful - photographs? Video? Well it would be, if people filled it out well. What would be better, proposes the author, would be if there were a moratorium on metadata. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ADL to Conduct Mobile Learning Research Needs Analysis
Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) , March 11, 2013
This came to me via a LinkedIn posting from Jason Haag: "ADL is launching a new research effort with the goal of supporting education and training professionals transitioning from eLearning to mLearning by providing a mobile learning framework and catalog of microstrategy examples for thinking more deeply about their systematic design processes and mobile-specific affordances." In particular are the unique affordances made possible by mobile learning, such as global positioning and direct device-to-device communication. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teens have always gone where identity isn't
Jonathan Libov , Whoops, March 11, 2013
Statements that describe an entire demographic - 'teens', say - are always dubious and subject to counterexamples, but beyond the hyperbole is a point worth taking home in this text: "Teens eschew Facebook and Twitter for Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and other apps not because they're a new, different generation, but because they don't yet have much of an identity to boast of." Such spaces allow them to try on new identities, and to be someone they aren't. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can MOOCs Save Academic Freedom?
K. Edward Renner, Edudemic, March 11, 2013
Interesting angle on MOOCs and not one that would spring to mind immediately. But... could MOOCs save academic freedom? Well, that depends a lot on what is threatening it.  In this article, the concerns are globalization and commercialization. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, March 11, 2013
Dough Peterson asks, "Just how do computers store time anyway?  Does it think in days, hours, and minutes?" I actually have something like an answer to that question. Computers think in seconds (or, if they're stuffy, milliseconds). For a computer, any given time is a certain number of seconds after an arbitrary start date, known as the epoch. For unix computers (and therefore Linux and, these days, Apple) the epoch started at 12 a.m. January 1, 1970 (GMT). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hacking the Classroom: Beyond Design Thinking
Jackie Gerstein, User Generated Education, March 11, 2013
Sometimes people ask me what research methodology I employ, and after referring them to Paul Feyerabend and appropriate scepticism about research methodologys, I usually wave my arms in the direction of somethng like design methodology, which people can accept. Design methodology is how I set up my website, and design methodology is the process that created the first MOOCs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A Graphical View
Phil Hill, e-Literate, March 11, 2013
Because the whole emphasis on the new crop of MOOCs is their massiveness, it becomes very important how you count participants. Hence Phil Hills division of MOOC participants into four categories was broadly welcomed last week. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RIP: Google Reader Meets Its Inevitable End
Mat Honan, Wired, March 14, 2013
Google has always been a reluctant player in the RSS arena, maybe because people who use RSS have much less need for Google's core search services. One of my major complaints about Google+ was that it did not support RSS either as input or output. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)
L.M. Orchard, blog.lmorchard.com, March 14, 2013
L.M. Orchard writes, "Marco and Dave have it right: This will probably be a good thing for RSS. The problem has been that Google Reader was just good enough to lull me out of scratching my own itch." Quite true - even though I have my own aggregator, I still use Googel reader, because it has been good enough for now. But - now what? Maybe something like "distributed social novelty filtering." It woukd be really nice to see someting set up along those lines. More...