By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. HP’s Ink Subscription Has DRM That Disables Your Printer Cartridges
Josh Hendrickson, How-To Geek, 2019/02/11
It turns out that the idea of putting digital rights management (DRM) into your printer ink is as bad as it sounds. "Here’s the kicker: if you cancel, your ink stops working. You read that right; as soon as your billing cycle ends the printer will not accept the ink anymore." You're also sending a whole lot of data to HP - page count, page type, and more. That's because there are limits on the number of pages you can print as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CSS Specificity — An overview
Vaibhav Khulbe, Medium, 2019/02/11
This post explores the weeds of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language that creates the design for web pages. CSS 'specificify' rules to the method web browsers use to select which CSS declaration to apply to a particular part of a web page. For example, if you said the default text style for your whole page is 'Arial' and the default text style for this paragraph is 'Times New Roman', your browser needs to make a choice (and will choose the latter, according to CSS specificity). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dawn or dusk of the 5th age of research in educational technology? A literature review on (e-)leadership for technology-enhanced learning in higher education (2013-2017)
Deborah Arnold, Albert Sangrà, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2019/02/11
The first four 'ages' ae defined by Winn (2002) (21 page PDF) as the studies of instructional design, message design, simulation/interaction design, and (the new) learning environment design. The 'fifth age' is proposed by Jameson (2013) (27 page PDF) and is the focus on "more critical, selective, strategic e‐leadership approaches to the adoption and use of educational technology." This paper is an update of that 'fifth age' and is "an exploratory review of the literature for the period 2103-2017." The result is a pretty good paper on work in educational technology management. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laws of UX
Jon Yablonski, 2019/02/11
This is a set of 19 key tenets of User Experience (UX). They're nicely summarized and illustrated, and each one has a 'More' button linking to an extended description and links to more resources. Each also has a nice downloadable poster suitable for framing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Blogosphere As an Artifact of Distributed Cognition
Over on the other blog today I have posted a longish item called What I am Working On. It's another attempt to explain things like learning networks and distributed cognition (if I try enough times I'll eventually get it, right?). The sorts of things discussed in this article constitute the sorts of things I think about on a day-to-day basis - and while the author is showing how brains are different from computers, there is a flipside, which is, how computers could be the same as brains, but aren't, yet. Lots of room for invention. Like this, for example: "The brain uses content-addressable memory." What does that mean? The author says, "The end result is that your brain has a kind of 'built-in Google.'" Well, yeah. But: "memories are composed of linked sensory fragments -- odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value
When asked how to create knowledge management solutions for an organization, consultants may respond with "creating big central 'knowledge bases', or websites, or community of practice 'collaboration spaces'." Sound familiar? But Dave Pollard argues, correctly, that "these types of initiatives tend to produce disappointing results.. these are easy to do, and often fun, which is perhaps why they're so tempting... but I think programs that focus more on context than content, and more on connection than collection, often pay the biggest dividends. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Help define digital literacy
W. Ian O'Byrne, 2019/02/11
Last week Ian O'Byrne wrote of work he is doing with  the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to define digital literacy. He was asked "why this work wasn’t being conducted in the open" and this post is the result. There's some annotation work being done with hypothes.is and he's using FlipGrid to solicit video-recorded opinions (this site is mostly empty, though). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools
Helen Barrett consolidates some of her work on e-portfolios and Web 2.0. "One advantage of Web 2.0 tools is that many of them are free, although WikiSpaces may place ads on the page. There is some concern about security in a K-12 school environment, so care should be taken when using these tools with children." See also these audio clips from some of her e-portfolio presentations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RSS Feeds Monetization Tools: A Mini-Guide
Advertising is slowly becoming more pervasive in the world of RSS syndication, which means the efforts to clamp down on syndication and sharing can't be far behind. This article lists a number of companies offering tools that create ads in RSS feeds. What the article doesn't mention is that feed readers (such as Blogline and Google reader) have started putting the number of subscribers into their browser information when they access your feed; this means that feed owners can look at their logs and add up the number of people subscribe to the feed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why to Not Not Start a Startup
A very interesting read. The author is a (small) venture capitalist that provide (a tiny amount of) funding to potential startups. Many interesting bits. Including: "If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort." More...