By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Edubloggers As Prisoners of the Nation State.
Artichoke revisits my critique of school 2.0 from a couple months ago (which makes me happy, because it went largely unremarked by the school 2.0 crowd). She writes, "If Illich could imagine a good education system - one that didn't need schools and classrooms in 1971, why do we keep pretending we need schools and classrooms to learn in 2007". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Training Blogs...All in One Place
Pageflakes has been around for a while but this Training Blogs page is relatively new. I aggregate something like 400 blogs, so I would say that Karl Kapp's use of the word "all" is a bit different from mine. But it does point to a weakness in the PageFlakes model of information display - when you array blogs for scanning, the upper limit is maybe 20 on a page (I'm sure a usability study could pin that down to 18.37 but you get the idea). Another problem is currency - I found myself clicking on a post from last April - because the scanning display doesn't disappear posts when they get old. I also don't like the constant pop-ups displaying feed text - you can't move your mouse at all without hitting a half dozen of them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desire2Blog
Greetings from Duluth, where I am attending (but not presenting) at the Desire2Learn user conference, an unusual experience for me. Early impressions include taking note of some insider expression s ("publish up") and thinking that the white shirts worn by every D2L staffer (and there are a lot of there here) is a little bit cult-like. Today's presentation by Ruth Clark was weak, in my view; Will Richardson and Nancy White are on tomorrow and Wednesday. You'll get much more coverage of the conference at Barry Dahl's Desire2Blog site. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Have You Watched Blogging: In Their Own Words Yet?
Christian Long writes, "Wonderful to hear students and teachers talk candidly about the impact of blogging on their academic lives. Certainly more striking (and relevant) than yet another (me, included) edu-blogger trying to trumpet the message on their virtual own". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The HyperSpace Blog Is Live on… HyperSpace
HyperSpace, 2019/03/12
I've been keeping an eye on the HyperSpace project with some interest. In a nutshell, HyperSpace is a distributed publishing platform that uses it's own digital currency to promote and reward participation. The longer term roadmap, though, envisions a fully decentralized publishing economy. Today it took a major step in that direction. Here's the HyperSpace Blog on HyperSpace. You can join Hyperspace, create a post, and in addition to publishing on Hyperspace, the post will be published on the Inter-Planetary File System. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. #OpenBlog19 Most Valuable Lesson I Ever Learned
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2019/03/11
I'm not sure whether this is something I can commit to (not sure how often new topics will be posted by self-appointed moderator David Hopkins) but this is the sort of thing people used to do before social media - not the hashtag bit, the blogging bit - and I think it might be fun. The idea, in a nutshell: people submit topic ideas to David, he posts one as an #OpenBlog19 blogging topic, and then people write blog posts on that topic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Inside or Outside the Corporate Firewall
Some comments on my post from yesterday talking about PLEs and corporate learning. Jay Cross says it was nonsense. He writes, "He knows full well that the reason I question 'Personal' is that I don't want us to forget that learning is co-creation, not solo." So, what, we replace 'personal' with 'work'? How does that follow? Tony Karrer writes, "Stephen's very much correct about a PLE being for the person. It is going to be a challenge for corporations to come to grips with the ownership of the learning if it is captured in a system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging 2.0
Interesting discussion of the future of blogging. "The future of blogging must be connected to why people blog now," writes Ian Delaney, and also why they don't blog. Many aspiring bloggers underestimate the workload - and so future blogging may resemble more micro-blogging (such as twitter) or passive blogging. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Most Popular Blogs!
TonNet questions the 'top 15' lists provided by Technorati and eBizMBA, lists which are, of course, completly different. What was interesting about eBizMBA was that it combines rakings from various tracking services. So of course I was curious to see how my site was viewed by these various services. Here's the result (ranking in brackets) at SiteExplorer, Snapshot (151,759th), Quantcast (312,342th), and Alexa (119,548th). I don't use Feedburner. Technorati ranks me 4,112 (interestingly, that's a drop of 1100 since yesterday!). The result is that the traffic statistics are essentially fictions - there's a wide variety among the services and none of them comes close to estimating the actual number of readers. All of these services offer ways to make your data 'more accurate' by letting them track your readers - and I suspect your 'more accurate' traffic is significantly higher. More...