By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Debating the "Brain Glitch" Theory
The interminable phonics debate (how did this get so politicized?) continues in ASCD's Educational leadership and carries over into this item in the ASCD Blog. The debate begins with neurologist Judy Willis criticizing claims that "neuroscience proves the necessity of intensive phonics instruction for students who struggle with reading." In particular, she points to the limits of neuroimaging technologies. And she questions whether the children being studied were actually rerading of whether they were merely reciting. The response suggests that Willis ognores decades of research showing that "to read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech." I'm more inclined to the view that learning to read is complex, including both elements of phonics and language structure or syntax. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Inter Partes Determination Published
The nice clear version: "The USPTO found 13 of Desire2Learn's 14 claims to raise substantial new questions of patentability." (Aside: it is interesting to note that the use of a tag, in this case 'edupatents', imposes a requirement on the part of the writer - hence Feldstein's note in this post. This is why I use regular expressions rather than tags - a regular expression captures the words that would notmally be used in a post, rather than requiring that the author use a word that doesn't even exist. The Blackboard patent page uses a regular expression, which is why I don't even need to think about it). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Educational Resources Taking Off
Useful post on issues related to open educational resources (OERs) that also points the reader to the Open Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project that "aims at building an online information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of OER, in particular, open digital educational content (ODEC) in Europe". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MED Online for Free
This is the sort of thing that makes the internet great (and which really rekindles my belief in free and open online resources). The entire Old English dictionary (with all the references, etc) has been made available for free online by the University of Michigan. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life&Voice - It Will Happen!
They can't handle more than 38,000 people at a time, forcing them to kick 'non-paying' customers off the service at peak loads, but they're going to have voice chat integrated by June, 2007? You know, what this reminds me of is AOL's original strategy - advertising like crazy, offering a service that they couldn't sustain, then turning around and using the hype money to buy a real business, which in their case turned out to be Time-Warner. More...