By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion
An article worth reading. I will mention in passing that I am opposed to the trend coming from the corporate learning side of the house to treat PLEs as work tools. What is it about people in corporate learning that they feel the need to perpetuate the attitude of servitude it seems all learners must adopt. We don't exist to work for a corporation; our learning, our minds, our most valuable asset of all, ought to serve our own purposes first and foremost. But I guess it's employers, not employees, paying the bills for corporate e-learning consultants, and thy wanna hear what they wanna hear. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Assessment
Post I wrote explaining the concept of 'open source assessment' I have been tossing around lately. Were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources. But if assessment is closed and proprietary, then we are still facing an accessibility issue. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour June 7, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Open Source, Accessibility, Assessment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Biking to Belgium


I finished up around four my last day in Holland and so had time to do something I'd always wanted to do - to bicycle from town to town in rural Europe. My expedition grew as the hours passed and eventually became a push for the Belgian border. My zig-zag path (which would have benefited from a map) attempted to avoid the hills at the border and resulted in my reaching the highest point in Holland. A nice way to finish my trip. I also have photos from 's-Hertogenbosch, Rotterdam and Maasterich. Stephen Downes, Flickr June 7, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr, European Union]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Good LORd
James Farmer cites D'Arcy Norman: "A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side). I think it's fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically." Well yes. Farmer suggests people don't add content to these institutional repositories because it does nothing for them (and we're all pretty selfish, he says). And "you may, actually, shudder, need to employ a genuine human bean of sorts." Yet people have creted millions of blog posts, podcasts and videos without being paid. So what's up? People like to create content, and thy like to help each other - they aren't inherently selfish; there's lots of evidence to show they want to share, even if there's no benefit to themselves. What they don't feel the need to do, though, is to provide institutional-type content to institutional-type repositories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Are the Big Problems in Ed-Tech?
I echo Tim Lauer's reaction to Tom Hoffman's statement: "We've got a situation akin to letting the clerks in the purchasing department decide whether or not the books ordered by teachers and librarians are acceptable." This also strikes me as worth citing: "Utter chaos around privacy, safety and liability. The 'practical' advice being promoted seems out of sync with empirical evidence... the problems are driven by anxious parents, who aren't exactly rational actors." Hoffman is right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Technologies of Collaboration
Overview slide show presented to ASTD listing (and linking to) a variety of cpllaborative technologies. Useful, but pale blue on mini-PDF slides is not the best format for readability (I had to enlarge to 250 percent to read the links). The remarks in the blog post are interesting: "About half of the training professionals had used Google Earth, but almost none had tried Second Life. In fact, I had the impression that much of what I showed was completely new to most of the attendees". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Trends and Impacts of E-Learning 2.0
I am in Taiwan and so - of course - my downes.ca email has crashed and burned. I have no email coming in or out, and the email newsletter has been disabled (RSS is still ok though). And it's really hard to work with tech support people with a 12-hour time difference.
But I'm having a great time. And I've posted slides from my workshop and presentation on Slideshare. I have video from the presentation too, I'll see if I can't post that (I would do more video but I can't get around the DVD produced by video cameras - of all the useless formats to give me to use! I can't find any easy way to turn it into something my computer understands (ie., can do something with besides just play).
Did I mention I'm really jet-lagged? Anyhow, I fly home Friday and if you're one of the people waiting for email from me, don't worry, I haven't forsaken you. Stephen Downes, Slideshare June 12, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Video, Open Content, RSS, E-Learning 2.0]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Failure to Innovate Sinking Economy: Report
As somebody whose job description is basically 'to innovate' a report like this is almost personal. Do we really not innovate in Canada? I see so much evidence to the contrary! But then when I look at the indices, I see the explanation: "Fewer scientific articles are published in Canada, fewer patents are granted." Does the Conference Board of Canada feel my work - which is government funded but which produces very few patents or formal publications - to be a "stunningly poor" showing? Well maybe. But perhaps the Conference Board doesn't understand 'innovation' any more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How has Information Changed?
Tom Hoffman's observations - that this post is not about the nature of information at all - are on point. But the post is illustrative of common misconceptions about the changing nature of media. Of these, forst is probably the confusion between 'information' and 'content'. By 'content' we can mean the messages sent over various media, including television, tabloid newspapers, email, radio, and the rest. But not all of this content is information - if the message is one you've already heard, or if the message is of no use to you, then it is not 'information'. To be information, the content needs to change your understanding of the world (cf. Fred Dretske). A second misconception is in the confusion between the medium and the information. If the information is 'Paris is the capital of France', the medium - be it networked, physical, overwhelming - does not change this information. Paris remains the capital of France. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Another Tough Gig - I Enter the Lion'S Den
I don't post conference announcements but I can't resist passing along this session description )because it captures so many of my own predispositions): "Our keynote speaker has been working closely with UBC's IT professionals for years, and has consistently vexed them with his unorthodox demands and unwillingness to specify use cases. Brian will attempt to defend his shockingly lax approach to planning as a grounded philosophy intended to foster user autonomy and innovation. He will also review some approaches to web strategy that are emerging outside of campus environments, such as open access to content and open APIs, and attempt to make a case why we need to learn from these efforts and apply them within our educational institutions." He remarks, 'I see that the organizers deleted my concluding sentence, which was: "Attendees are responsible for bringing their own projectiles.' I guess that means suitable throwables will be provided in the conference loot bag." Read the rest of this post - Brian Lamb is tapping into some important trends. More...