By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Needs OLPC?
This post mostly makes the point that the rising cost of the OLPC (now $175) and the declining cost of commercial computers (now $289) are close to reaching convergence. Yes, the OLPC has some neat features, like a way to generate its own power. If you can live without Windows and Office (which seem to be more expenseive than the computer these days) then you're already at OLPC territory - if your school board takes advantage of the low prices and isn't seduced by marketing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Illogical Rhetoric of Share Alike
I don't agree with this post. I use 'share-alike' on my licenses (both Creative Commons and Open Source Software (where it's GPL) precisely because I don't want somebody coming along, doing a minor repurpose, and then claiming to 'own' the content. Leigh Blackall argues against 'share alike', though, because he can't use SA content in conjunction with proprietary materials, cultually restructed materials, or old commercial materials. Right. because such a combining would be a process of taking something that is freely sharable, and turning it into something that is not. It's just a clever way of raiding the commons for personal gain. But that said - there is nothing that presents the presentation of SA materials alongside commercial materials. You an still use the materials - you just can't pretend they are something you have created (and can restrict access to). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know
This post may be based on U.S. law, but the result is a good set of guidelines that constitute common sense in any jurisdiction. For example, "Never claim that you are an objective, unbiased source if you are being paid to provide information." Or "Always clearly distinguish between your work and someone else's." And this seems to be pretty obvious by now: "Never allow criminal comments or stolen content to remain on one of your sites." And for the commercial sites out there, "Never share or sell sensitive information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account information, criminal background or health records". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Games-Based Learning; a Serious Business Application
Good white paper covering game-based learning in some detail. I like the author's approach: "Games-Based learning isn't about using simplistic 'Pong' or 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' as a means to teach people raw facts. That was the approach that edutainment took and which by and large failed." There's a longish list of links to other white papers on p. 6 and a large number of examples. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 74 Quality Ruby On Rails Resources and Tutorials
Rich McIver sends along this resource. I'm familiar with a number of the tutorials listed. Some of them are a but out of date (Ruby and Rails have gone through rapid version changes, an artifact of development). Others I looked at today and look useful. The How to Install for many many different operating systems seems especially useful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blog Growth Stalling: Some Reasons Why I Nearly Quit Blogging
According to Technorati, the growth of the blogosphere has stalled at about 14 million active blogs. People still start blogging, then quit. This post offers some reasons why. I would add a generalized category of 'retribution' to the list. This is what you get if you use your real name. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education Reform
I am not normally attributed with great economy of words, but that's how I'm feeling just now. In response to this post on education reform, I posted a comment. It was short, and I didn't even post it in my blog (I guess I will now). Tom Haskins analyzed my comment and responded with four separate posts drawing out the themes of my response:
- Sizing up the opposition
- Winning without a battle
- Conflicting educations
- No new change required. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Presentations
I had expected to be on a flight on my way to Bahrain at this very moment, however, my conference was postponed. I am still due to speak in London on May 10th and to be at CADE in Winnipeg the following week, though as the paperwork hasn't arrived I'm on tenterhooks. I have been working overtime all week getting the list of my presentations prepared in order to satisfy a different set of paperwork. I was half way through this project when I had to move my site a few months ago, getting all of my presentations into the database. These pages display links to the slides and audio as well as to a slide how player (from Slideshares) and a (mostly nonfunctioning) audio player. I'll be inserting photos and video into those pages as well. Any suggestions on how to improve this display would be welcome. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Project Based Learning, Video, Audio]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Last Lecture
Brian Lamb highlights the idea of the 'last lecture' as evoked in Gardner Campbell's presentation. "if you were you to give one last lecture or presentation, what would you say? Presumably you wouldn't hold anything back, you would share your deepest passions and convictions... but how to use that precious time?" Me, I'd probably be like. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digg This: 09 F9 11 02 9d 74 E3 5b D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Definitely one for the annals, what we have here is the secret code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD videos (the Wikipedia article has a very useful table describing the difference between DVD formats). A media giant ordered Digg to remove the code, which Digg did, the company not have millions of dollars to fight lawsuits. Digg users rebelled. Digg displays stories based on votes submitted by users, and so for the rest of the day every story on Digg contained the code as users voted for them en masse. "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments," writes Kevin Rose, "you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." Bavatuesday has screen shots of the Digg RSS feed (my own is similar). BBC post on the topic. More...