By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creative Commons Vs MIT OCW: Interpreting the Noncommercial Clause
Well this is interesting: "CC (Creative Commons) and MIT OCW (OpenCourseWare) have diametrically opposed interpretations of the meaning of the NC clause of CC's own licenses." Creative Commons defines it accoding to the nature of the user, while OCW defines it according to the nature of the use (I have always, in my own thinking, thought of it as the latter). It's not exactly p = ~p (both could be true at the same time). But it's certainly enough to cause confusion (= money for lawyers). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard - Proving That Just Because You Know What a Blog Is, Doesn'T Mean You ‘Get It'
Scott Leslie is quite rightly grumpy after receiving being urged by a Blackboard PR Flack to cover its new social networking service. Grumpy, because the flack didn't even both to read his blog, which announced the service several weeks ago (and was widely cited in the blogosphere, including these pages, as having done so). "If you barge in waving your press release about, don't expect me to treat you any different than I would the vacuum cleaner sales guy who rings my doorbell during a dinner party." On the other hand - I don't get anything from Blackboard. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Simple Genius of the Blackboard
Lewis Buzbee, Slate, 2014/10/22
I'm not sure quite what to make of this, but... "The blackboard-centered classroom offers more than pedagogical efficiency; it also offers an effective set of teaching possibilities. In such a classroom students are focused on the teacher (on a good day), but most importantly, they are focused". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Microsoft or Google your next LMS? The view from BETT
Jason Cole, e-Literate, 2019/02/06
The article barely mentions Google, so I imagine it's mentioned just for completeness. But there are two major strands of interest. First is the stand of no-shows at the large English technology conference: "the absence of the major LMS vendors besides Instructure Canvas... D2L, Moodle, the UK Moodle partners, and Blackboard had no discernible presence." Second, "When Microsoft makes their push, the learning system won’t look like an LMS, but it will look like Teams... Microsoft is rapidly integrating service platforms for email, calendar, business logic, business intelligence, AI, device management, and cloud services into the Teams platform". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Open Letter to Google Founders
Isaac Mao posts an open letter (which will be read by Google execs) proposing a plan to end internet censorship in China. "You can imagine how eager they are to have a complete Internet instead of a shrunken one." Quite right. Parts of the plan escape me, though. He calls for, first, a billion dollar venture capital fund in China, second, the development of anti-censorship tools and services, and third, increased incentives for adsense users. Me, I would add widely available Chinese-English translation. OLDaily, for example, is laboriously translated by hand for Chinese readers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft Backs OpenID
This is obviously a major development, and one we've been waiting for. "This is a major development in identity management, and marks the beginning of a serious effort to unite OpenID's distributed identity specification with the CardSpace system developed by Microsoft." If CardSpace is new to you, it is "a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website." Similar plugins are being developed for Mozilla and Safari as well. Now if Google and Yahoo play ball, we have one seamless identity system (I should note that Liberty Alliance is a holdout as well). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Makes a Pledge
More on the Blackboard pledge. Inside Higher Ed comes in with comprehensive and well-source coverage showing, I think, that nobody is satisfied with the Blackboard pledge, and more than a few think Blackboard was "misleading" in the way it portrayed, in its press release, support from Sakai and EDUCAUSE. More commentary (all negative) from Barry Dahl, Mark Oehlert, Joseph Hart, Seb Schmoller. meanwhile, we have this very odd report about an email sent to the "Blackboard Community" containing a very very misleading interpretation of the Sakai-EDUCAUSE statement. More...