By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Government Statement on Proposals for Copyright Reform
Two Canadian departments, Industry Canada and Canadian Heritage, have issued an important joint statement on legislation to be proposed covering copyright and file sharing in Canada. The document addresses short term concerns (with longer term items being subject to a consultation process). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Help with Blogging Assignments
The value of this post is in the comments. The author describes a blog writing assignment he is using - an assignment that is failing to generate the sort of response he is looking for. Several good suggestions have been offered already - you may have more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creative Commons Search
For those (few) of you who don't know, Creative Commons is a type of license that allows you to use other people's work for free. In other words, it allows people to share content, rather than having to buy it from publishers. What will make Creative Commons really work is the ability to find this material. The Creative Commons website recent launched a Creative Commons search and this week's big news is the Yahoo Cretaive Commons search. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Googlebug Gaining Momentum; Ourmedia Not as Good As It Sounds
The main point of this post is to argue that using centralized services is a bad idea. Hence, for example, a bug in the Google search service cause widespread disruption. In the same vein, depending on a centralzied service such as OurMedia (or, as I have commented recently, Flickr) can for the same reason be a bad idea. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bookmarklet: Delicious Linkbacks
Nifty. A link that you can drag to your bookmark toolbar. Go to a web page, any web page, then click on the bookmark. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shifting Mindsets: The Changing Work Roles of Vocational Education and Training Practitioners
Role expansion, role diversification, changing balance and tension: these are the changes in workplace being experienced by vocational education and praining practitioners as documented in this newly released report. Change, influenced by worldwide trends and reflected in new policy, has been sweeping through the system and has had an impact on how these practitioners do their jobs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Computers 'Can Harm Learning'
Once again the Woessmann-Fuchs study that I criticized last November is getting media play (they must have hired a publicist), this time because it is being presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is the Semantic Web Hype?
Let's start here: "There are many cognitive costs associated with adding formalized information to a computer system. Foremost, users must learn a system s formal language," from Shipman and Marshall, Formality Considered Harmful. Scott Leslie writes, "dryly academic but still useful." Now let's get to the current item: "In the Semantic Web, someone has to provide a mapping to allow different vocabularies to interoperate." Worse, these mappings are highly formal and arcane; a recipe for disaster. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Preparing Instructors for Quality Online Instruction
Some people will like this paper, which is why I'm including it, but I didn't. From where I sit, it's a classic case of drowning the reader through needless citations (do we need Volery (2000), for example, to tell us that "online delivery is a form of distributed learning enabled by the Internet?"). This close attention to citation comes at the cost of common sense. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Literature Review – Faculty Participation in Online Distance Education: Barriers and Motivators
The spring, 2005, edition of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is now available. I list three papers, beginning with this one. Good overview of some articles in this topic highlighted by a chart added as an appendix, though I wish the author had surveyed more papers and reports (thirteen are surveyed). More...