By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DOIs, HANDLE, CORDRA and Architectures of Control
After some discussion on this last week, Mark Oehlert through a series of emails interviewed me on these initiatives. What emerges is a pretty good overview of my feelings on the subject. I don't see the need for the handle system, nor do I think that it's a good thing that CORDRA, ADL's answer to the Open Archives Initiative, is based on it. Mark Orhlert and Stephen Downes, e-Clippings February 19, 2007 [Link]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AOL Is Doing OpenID!
It's so nice to see all the players falling into line on this one; it has been some time coming. And not just because I predicted it (and I was the only one of the twenty who did, too). Scott Wilson on this: "I've tried integrating OpenID support into a Rails... it works remarkably well, remarkably quickly, with no particular specialist knowledge. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boycott Bloglines Image Wall!
Bloglines has created a new service that creates an 'image wall' out of harvested RSS feeds. Miguel Guhlin has created a bit of a stir in the edublogosphere by calling on educators to boycott it because "entering the Image Wall (and who reads those disclaimers anymore?), I was looking at pregnant women, a couple in a passionate embrace, and. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desktop Sidebar - Getting Rid of Desktop Widgets and Still Having It All
I pay little attention to web page widgets because I find they slow down the page and are much more interesting to the page owner than to the page user. Desktop widgets are more interesting, save that they're mostly an Apple thing and would be covered by my applications. Enter the Desktop Sidebar, which almost takes us back to the days of PointCast. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikiversity, Wikieducator Please Join and Make Wikilearner
Leigh Blackall is forced by site outage to shift his attention from Wikiversity - a Wikipedia style online learning platform - to Wikieducator, a similar project set up in December, 2006, by the Commonwealth of Learning. "Wikieducator has made fantastic progress since last I looked," he writes. "Apart for a range of great tutorials, the key players in wikieducator have been more innovative and experimental in my view. They now have a web based IRC chat facility on the main nav - which is getting closer to Teemu's vision of a VOIP supported community learning network; they support media embedding, they use funky templates to play around with navigation and content layout, and they already have some significant contributions." Well good, but I wonder about his call for the two to join forces. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER Commons: Open Educational Resources
Jorge Goncalves cites from the website: "OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues' course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today's classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices." The materials seem to be drawn mostly from universities participating in OpenCourseWare initiatives. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. U Learning = Elearning + Mlearning
This is quite a good presentation (slides in PDF, ugh) describing the integration of learning resources and communications to support learning using handheld computers at Monash. There are bits that don't appear to me - like the use of Microsoft's ASP.Net to implement the service (there's that whole 'closed architecture' that characterizes mobile learning again) but the sections on technical considerations and educational considerations are basically spot-on. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EU to Push Online Publication of Scientific Data
With the publishers on the sidelines pleading for leniency, the European Commission is going ahead with plans to ensure that scientific data and the results of scientific research are freely available online. Funny, I didn't see any leniency on the part of publishers when users were pleading for an access system that involved reasonable pricing and less stringent DRM. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Does the Business Community Give a Damn About Kids?
Roger Schank's criticism misses the mark a bit, as the report he cites comes from the New Media Consortium, which isn't exactly the 'business community' (though there's an overlap). His comment, though, is interesting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Educational Testing Service reports: * substantial disparities in skill levels (reading and math) * seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps) * sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills). And it seems to me that what we are seeing is one attempt at education reform after another as a substitute for addressing the persistent and pervasive problem standing in the way of achievement in society: the ever widening gap in socio-economic status and opportunity. More...