By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interoperability In the New Digital Identity Infrastructure
Scott Leslie sends this paper over, commenting that it might muddy, rather than clarify, the identity waters. He's right, as the author brings in the whole 'card-space' approach to identity into the picture and suggests that the identity infrastructure will need to accommodate those as well as the simpler (and more functional) OpenID-type specifications. The identity space could become complex in a hurry (which of course suits the big companies well). Overall, an informed discussion, but the problem should not be characterized as a 'tragedy of the commons' but rather, unless we can keep companies from carving it up among themselves, a problem of 'theft of the commons' - a far more common, and tragic, scenario. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2007
I am in Boston where I'll be presenting at the E-Learning Guild conference tomorrow. I caught most of the keynote summarized by Jay Cross in this post and while it surveyed the trends evident in the participation culture it didn't, I think, capture the import. We are seeing today movements that are derivative of popular culture - people protesting WTO and governments, people mashing up commercial media, people gaming American Idol. But these are transition phenomena. Eventually (and sooner than you might thing) people will want to govern themselves, create their own media, select their own idols. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics...
The author ponders, "Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction... You would probably hate the subject."
I have been toying with half an idea recently, nothing fully formed, that we ought to be teaching language rather than a language. Instead of, for example, teaching 'I', 'me', 'you', 'he' we would teach the concept of pronouns generally and how they are handled in a dozen or so languages. And students would see the relation between 'I' and 'Je' and 'Yo' and the rest, see how the same concept yields what is more or less the same word in these languages. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Psiphon - Creating Cracks in the Great Firewall
Not sure I've mentioned this before, but it's worth pointing to this application that helps you see content through firewalls - whether the great firewalls that surround entire nations or the little firewalls that surround schools. Just remember if you use it that very little of what you do online is genuinely anonymous. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AIMS Fails Learning 101
Just a note to our legislators in New Brunswick, that they should not be listening to the (not so neutral) advice of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, which is recommending standardized testing, and should instead be listening to people who have actually studied education and done some research in the field, who recommend against it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rapid eLearning Panel
I'd be curious to know what people made of our panel, which was a rollicking all-over-the-map free-for-all, but I'll make do with Jay Cross's assessemnt of the rapid e-learning panel. "While no one came out and said it, rapid eLearning can cut the instructional designer out of the process. One member of the audience cautioned against letting the rapid tools fall into the wrong hands." heh. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Learning
I don't know. I'm a bit out of my element, speaking to corporate e-learning industry types here in Boston. I have been thinking of all the events of the last year, of where I was when I spoke in Tennessee. It feels like it was yesterday. Learning for 'a better life' just doesn't seem to be on the radar screen. I can talk about webs and networks and personal learnings and PLEs but there's a disconnect unless people see themselves as learners rather than teachers. Unless they are seeking to empower themselves and build their own lives, rather than seeing themselves as helpless before the whims of those with power and control. Anyhow, here are the slides and here is the audio. There is some new stuff on PLEs, especially near the end. Stuff to think about and develop further. "Use these technologies to develop your own learning," I said at the panel, suggesting that they can't tell people to use new technologies, they can only model and demonstrate. Is this what the audience wants to hear? I don't know - but it's the only story I can tell. Same as it ever was. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web April 12, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Podcasting, Networks, Online Learning, Audio]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.

by Stephen Downes
April 12, 2007

So It Goes...

1922 - 2007
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., April 12, 2007 [Link]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. McLuhan'S Laws of Media and the PLE
When confronted with new media, McLuhan said, ask these simple questions: what does it enhance? What dos it obsolete? What does it retrieve? What does it reverse? If you have an answer to these, well, as Terry Anderson argues, "This brief mapping of PLEs to McLuhan's Laws of Media illustrates that PLEs constitute a new educational media. More importantly, noting the inherent adherence to McLuhan's four laws helps us understand how best to exploit this technology and what to be on guard against as the PLE cycles through exhibition of all four Laws of Media." Via George Siemens, who says it sort of does and sort of doesn't. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Importance of Learning Slowly
This is expressed a bit differently than usual, but it works: "Like neural networks, the brain is based on vector algebra, rather than numerical computations. Vectors have strength and direction, and many vectors, representing multiple inputs, unite to form a result. The result in the brain is strengthening or weakening of a set of neural connections, a relatively slow process. While a single event can have an impact, it usually takes many events to have a relatively permanent change in the brain (aka "learning") and to extract general features and generate rules from experience." Right. More...