By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School of Thought: Why Aren't E-Textbooks Selling
You can probably guess what my answer would be to the question in the title: something about inflated costs, closed marketplaces, and stupid DRM. According to this article, the answer is "lack of knowledge, poor marketing and few choices." Yeah, right. That's what they said about New Coke. The more interesting bit, though, is an interview with the International Digital Publishing Forum's executive director, Nick Bogaty, who, as the article states, "wants to make file extension .ops to digital books what .mp3 is to music." OPS - the Open Publication Structure (OPS) and its sister format, the Open Packaging Format (OPF), are to textbooks what LOM is to learning objects, more or less. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On "The Perils of Stargazing" and the NMC Horizon Report
Scott Leslie (who has just switched from Movable Type to WordPress and so now has comments working) defends the NMC Horizon Report predictions listed here yesterday, calling them "that actually seem to bear some resemblance to conceivable futures, not 'wished for' futures..." Well, maybe, but as I said yesterday, the NMC list isn't a list of 'futures', conceivable or otherwise, it's a list of vague fads or trends everyone felt safe predicting, without regard to whether it had already happened or whether it was just some corporate hype. For the record, I do prefer Leslie's list: automatic translation, intelligent tutoring, and distributed identity. If you want more ideas, you could look at the KnowledgeWorks Foundation's Education map of the decade. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Second Life
Interesting. Description of a teacher's experimental forays into Second Life. "I was able to talk with other educators and bounce ideas off of them... all of this could be accomplished in an educational centered chat room, but somehow this was different." Great, right? Well, there's this: "I still probably won't make it back into Second Life anytime soon because I don't have the real need right now." And I worry about this, from a CNN article: "It's the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net - this one in 3-D and even more social than the original - with huge opportunities to sell products and services." And more, as noted by PacRimX, "Linden hopes to control the standards for virtual worlds so that they become the equivalent of the HTTP and HTML standards that define the web." We had a standard, remember? VRML. What was wrong with it? Nobody owned it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Centralizing Decentralization
George Siemens introduces the newly launched Lotus Connections with the comment, "the majority of individuals will start using these tools once the strength of the tools (decentralization, modularization) is replaced with a model less pure in spirit, and more in line with how many people prefer to work (i.e. centralization for reduced cognitive load)." Yes, but then they'll stop using these tools, because they don't really work very well, and they'll blame people for making overstated claims about them. It's not a question of some sort of ideological "purity," it's about building something that works. When you centralize these things, you break them. More...