By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Open Letter to Google Founders
Isaac Mao posts an open letter (which will be read by Google execs) proposing a plan to end internet censorship in China. "You can imagine how eager they are to have a complete Internet instead of a shrunken one." Quite right. Parts of the plan escape me, though. He calls for, first, a billion dollar venture capital fund in China, second, the development of anti-censorship tools and services, and third, increased incentives for adsense users. Me, I would add widely available Chinese-English translation. OLDaily, for example, is laboriously translated by hand for Chinese readers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Notepads - Ordinary Paper, Handwriting Recognition
Cool. I want one of these. "Digital notepads allow you to write on ordinary paper, but have your handwriting automatically recognised and converted into data later. Also, any diagrams you draw are faithfully reproduced as electronic copies and can be sent around as email, attached to discussion boards etc." When people think of mobile computing they usually think of mobile phones, but thinks like this are, to my mind, much more practical implementations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Best of Elearning Awards 2006
Very commercially focused - it's like the world of open source (and, for that matter, the world of teachers) doesn't even exist. It seems a bit weird to see 'best leadership training' as a category, but nothing like 'best chemistry training'. It goes without saying that this website was completely shut out - there's no category for the kind of e-learning we do here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pipes
It doesn't seem to be working with my Firefox at the moment, but it is certainly worth passing along. "Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment." There's also some discission on Digg. Tony Hirst also comments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft Backs OpenID
This is obviously a major development, and one we've been waiting for. "This is a major development in identity management, and marks the beginning of a serious effort to unite OpenID's distributed identity specification with the CardSpace system developed by Microsoft." If CardSpace is new to you, it is "a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website." Similar plugins are being developed for Mozilla and Safari as well. Now if Google and Yahoo play ball, we have one seamless identity system (I should note that Liberty Alliance is a holdout as well). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Universities Register for Virtual Future
According to this article, "more than 70 universities have built island campuses in Second Life." I have been asking people what it is that appeals about Second Life, and the answer seems to be 'presence' (that should make Terry Anderson happy). OK, I see that, but how is presence in Second Life different than, say, presence in a chatroom? Or maybe it isn't - I've seen no real slowdown in chatrooms per se, it's just that nobody makes a big fuss about them any more. I think that what we are seeing is a return to the familiar. It's not just presence, it's environment. That's probably what bothers me about it, too. That kind of environment never did anything for me. All the capabilities and freedoms I got by moving online, I lose again when I'm in a 2L lecture. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unpersons
Anne Galloway links to this video. I don't think you have to be in an institution to be an unperson. You simply have to be thought of as deficient in some way. And if you think of yourself as deficient in some way, you see this as yourself being treated as an unperson. As Neko Case sings, "And if I knew heartbreak was coming, I would've set out running, 'Cause I just can't shake this feeling, That I'm nothing in your eyes." I know, none of that is the point of the video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Quick 30 Writing Tips for the Start of an Academic Career
An odd combination of something that is at once common sense and distasteful. Like this: "you might also be a bumblebee at conferences and walk from room to room (stand in the back) and see what other researchers are talking about. Normally, most speakers at conferences are boring. But if you listen to someone for 5-8 minutes, you can get some useful things from them in terms of what is current and what might be publishable down the road." Yeah, good advice, but I can't see myself doing it, because it doesn't seem like a nice way to treat the speaker. Or "If you enter a hot field just slightly before most, you will find yourself in a great situation for publishing." Well, yeah, but what does that about following your interests and your passion? Or this: "Finding an area to explore or direction for your research and build a career around is vital." All this advice is good, I guess, in that it will help you be a good researcher. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Recognition Factor
My presentation today to the Online Connectionism Conference. Slides (1.8 meg). Audio (11 meg). Connective knowledge is based on pattern recognition of emergent phenomena in networks. In order for a pattern to have any meaning, therefore, it must be recognized. This means that knowledge formation in a connective environment is a combination of two elements: the perception, which is the pattern to be recognized, and the perceiver, who does the recognizing. Knowledge, therefore, is not uniquely inherent in a network, but exists only insofar as it is recognized to exist. This talk explores this argument and its implications on a theory of connective knowledge. The Conference Moodle now has no login barrier at all! Good stuff. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web February 8, 2007 [Link] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Object Identifiers (Podcast) Jon Udell Talks with Tony Hammond
Mark Oehlert writes, "Welcome to the world of HANDLES and DOIs and DSpace and CORDRA. Don't know what they are? Think super-persistent URLs..also think those things which will enable those repositories of learning objects that is the goal of many to actually exist." No no no no no. This is what you'll get with DOIs (it's supposed to be Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 37--70). Persistence is the claim that is being made for them - but there is nothing more intrinsically persistent about a DOI than a URL. Servers already support a 'mod rewrite' function, which means that any given URL can point to an object anywhere in the world. And for those who don't have that, there is Purl and many similar services. So why DOI and the rest? To replace the http:// protocol. And why do that? To build access control into the fabric of the web. Why? Because the U.S. military wants it, that's why. DOI and CORDRA are not designed to give us repositories - we already have those. More...