By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Matt Pasiewicz: Identity Federation: Gartner Hints That Adoption Will Be Slow, EDUCAUSE Blogs September 16, 2005

Interesting. "While there is high interest in identity federation, the technology is still in flux and will likely be more expensive and time-consuming to implement immediately rather than three years from now." The interest in a federation per se is shared mostly by content providers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jared Spool: Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach, September 16, 2005

This is the key point: "When you think about consistency, you’re thinking about the product. When you’re thinking about current knowledge, you’re thinking about the user. They are two sides of the same coin. We’ve just noticed that the designers who spend more time thinking about the users are the ones that end up with more usable designs." A point with which, in the main, I agree. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clay Shirkey: Semi-Structured Meta-Data Has a Posse: A Response to Gene Smith, September 16, 2005

It is tempting to depict Clay Skirkey's defense of tagging as setting up a false dilemma between tagging and classification, but I think his view is more that tagging forms one part of a wider picture. "Full text indexing, link analysis, trust networks, and related techniques now accomplish about 80% of what classification used to do for us." That's an image I can live with more easily than the caricature view that 'tagging will by itself replace classification'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: MSCTC Online Writing Lab, September 16, 2005

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. David H. Jonassen: Let Us Learn to Solve Problems, ITForum September 16, 2005

David Jonassen forays into the uncertain and unforgiving world of online discussion as he posts this article for examination by the group at ITForum. "To blog or not to blog, that is the question this week," he writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning 2.0

September 16, 2005 I spent the day at the Canadian Heritage Information Network engaged in a lengthy and free-wheeling discussion of the concepts surrounding E-Learning 2.0 Although the PowerPoint Slides for my presentation today are basically the same as those I used in Edmonton a few months ago, the discussio0n was much more wide ranging. Audio segments (each about an hour): Part One, Part Two, Part Three. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. James Torio: Blogs: A Global Conversation, September 15, 2005

Pretty nice Master's Thesis on blogs, the business of blogs and blogging as conversation. While it doesn't really break new ground (the survey, in which I think I participated, adds very little), and while the range of resources consulted could be wider, the essay nonetheless offers a good introduction to the topic and is written in an engaging and well-informed tone. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adrian Wooldridge: The Brains Business, The Economist September 15, 2005

"A more market-oriented system of higher education can do much better than the state-dominated model." This is the central message being advanced in this series of articles, and the Economist is not above routine rhetorical sleight of hand to make the point (consider, for example, the false dichotomy drawn between "techno-utopians" and "cultural conservatives." Or ponder the omission of Canadian statistics in the comparisons between the U.S. system and purportedly "state-dominated" models). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter: Web 2.0 for Designers, Digital Web Magazine September 15, 2005

"In Web 1.0," writes the author, "a small number of writers created Web pages for a large number of readers." Enter Web 2.0, however, and this equation changes, "a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Gordon: Transient Identity, September 15, 2005

According to the author, "the concept of transient identity comes in to play when the ownership of personal identity is transferred back to the individual." It is transient because it is identity fixed at a certain point in time - the last time user info was entered into a website registration, for example. More...