By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. (Critical) History of ICT in Education - And Where We Are Heading?
According to Eric Duval, technology has had to day a minimal impact on the way we learn. Why is this? To a large degree, writes the author, because the old cultures get mixed in with the new ones. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Software Piracy 'Seen as Normal'
Some sanity in the reporting of what has come to be (misleadingly) called "piracy". According to this study, "people did not see downloading copyrighted material as theft." Well no kidding. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fighting Fake Diplomas in India
When I proposed my self-identification scheme a little while ago, a common question was, how do we know whether declarations of external credentials, such as diplomas or degrees, are genuine. This item points to the easy and inevitable answer I provided: educational institutions post lists of their graduates and degrees online. Like this item describes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MicroContent is Everywhere
Those of us who were involved in the early days of learning objects will see a lot of similarity between that concept and this description of microcontent offered at the Microlearning 2005 conference currently taking place in Innsbruck. Similarity, at least, that persisted up to the point where the concept was captured by content producers and converted into something that would be sold by vendors, organized into 'packages' by resellers, and passively consumed by learners. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. GLS02: James Paul Gee on New Paradigms for Learning
Summary of a talk by James Paul Gee in which he points to some failures of the U.S. educational system and asserts that "the solution to these crises is in our face: it’s popular culture and games; this is where it’s getting solved, not in our schools." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Learning Object Repository in Motion (Feeling a Little Bit aggRSSive)
Looks like this could be interesting. "Imagine that each of the tags in the image above (biology, bioinformatics, etc...) was linked to a set of RSS feeds drawn from learning resource collections, weblogs, journals, library collections, news sources, or whatever else users might find useful in an educational context." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. "Schome": Lifelong Learning and the Third Space
Some good messages in this post. The author describes a project started by Peter Twining of the Open University's Knowledge Network to develop wiki-based resource focused on "the education system for the Information Age." Also raised is the concept of 'shome'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Korea Brings Homegrown Open Source to Schools
10,000 locally made open source platforms are being rolled out in schools across South Korea. "The project, called the New Education Information System, is built on a Korean-developed version of Linux that already services 190 schools in the heart of capital city Seoul." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Real Work. Real Audience. Real Learning
Will Richardson gets an important point. "I love this story about Amy Gahran (whose Furl feed is worth following, btw) putting together a group of citizen journalists to cover a controversial housing development in her town." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Object Discussion
So anyhow, George Siemens has been planning this for a while, so I'll let him describe it: "This afternoon, I facilitated and enjoyable learning object discussion (with Brian Lamb, Scott Leslie, Jody Baty, Alan Levine, Scott Wilson, and David Wiley). The presentations are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three" Now I had intended also to be there but I missed my bus today to hear the end of Romeo Dallaire's talk. Which made me wonder how George got out the links so quickly. More...