By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeff Jarvis: New News: The Fear Factor, BuzzMachine December 21, 2005

Funny: "The first job is to instill fear in the newsroom. Oh, there's fear there now. But it is fear of the unknown. What we need is fear of the known." And the author continues on to list a few good reasons for fear, adding, "the first thing I think a newspaper should do is report about the future of news. Assign your best reporters and editors - the Bejesus Task Force - to get all the prognostications." Good advice, not just for journalists, but for everyone in the content business. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott McLemee: Aiming the Can(n)on, Inside Higher Ed December 21, 2005

From time to time I wonder whether anything I write will ever be read beyond next week, and so items like this - a look at the renaissance of the works of Lu Xun - interest me. The author ponders "the simplest model of how a literary canon is formed: An author gives voice to the ideology of the powers-that-be". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Paul Gray and David E. Drew: What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School, Inside Higher Ed December 20, 2005

A cynical though probably accurate guide for students hoping to complete their PhD. My assessment is more or less in line with that of one of the commentators: "A thoroughly depressing guide through the system as it is, with no mention that real live students will then be exposed to these calculating Texas Hold'em careerist operators, with predictable results for education." My advice for aspiring scholars is and always has been very simple: follow your passion. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clarence Fisher: Validating Information, Remote Access December 19, 2005

I think there are answers to the concerns Clarence Fisher raises in this item, but I think it is important that the concerns be aired. He reaises two major objections to the concept of validating information through aggregation. First, students do not have the opportunity. "Most often our kids work in units of study." And second, "as St. Augustine says, 'volume does not make right.'" And I think Fisher is exactly right to point to WalMart's (and, I might add, Chapters's) book vending policies to show why you can't simply go with the aggregate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Marc Meola[Edit][Delete]: Wikipedia And Academia, ACRLog [Edit][Delete] October 30, 2006

[link: Hits] So I guess there was a discussion about Wikipedia at the Chronicle, captured in this comment. Marc Meola responds, For the folks who say all sources have errors, that's true but it's impractical to ask people to be critical of and to fact check everything." It's this sort of thinking that leads people to trust "authoritative sources" and to then be led down the garden path. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Marco Fioretti: Linux in Italian Schools, Part 7: Teaching Free SW to Adults in Bari, Linux Journal December 16, 2005

Marco Fioretti wraps up a seven-part services on the use of Linux in Italian schools (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Good, solid observations and discussion. "Those who eventually do participate in Linux training sooner or later ask some variant of "what is the real usefulness of Linux, since [for example] it doesn't support as much hardware as Windows?" Loseto's answer is that Linux won't be the solution to their employment problems. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Luigi Canali De Rossi: New Media Predictions 2006: What Will The Web Future Bring?, Robin Good December 16, 2005

Robin Good makes some predictions on media for 2006, most of which seem to be on the mark to me. The most interesting is his speculation (probably accurate) that 2006 will be the year of video. I also like his suggestion that presentation - long the domain of PowerPoint - is due for a shake-up (think about what would happen if someone really souped up S5). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Darren Kuropatwa: OLÉ! - My Tango ..., A Difference December 15, 2005

Nothing like using Blogger as a presentation tool. Today we see a two-parter from Darren Kuropatwa, both parts available from this link. Part 1 is called OLÉ! - Orchestrating a Learning Ecology (or Learning the Tango). It sketches the evolving view of learning as informal and instructured, more like a dance than a script. Part 2 is called Rip, Mix, Learn. It surveys the tools used to support the learning described in the first part. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jim Giles: Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head, Nature December 15, 2005

This one is all over the blogosphere but I'll pass it along because it's directly relevant to some previous discussion here. As the article says, "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds." What was most interesting was the number of errors found in Britannica; we assume the peer-reviewed work is a gold standard for knowledge, but this standard is actually fairly loose. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yaffa Aharoni, Ariel J. Frank and Snunith Shoham: Finding information on the free World Wide Web: A Specialty Meta-search Engine for the Academic Community, First Monday December 14, 2005

I'm not surprised to see the proposal outlined in this paper. For academics, Google searches result in many (sometimes millions) of irrelevant results. And it doesn't search the 'deep web' of archived academic papers. Academic searches, meanwhile, are typically restricted to a particular site, such as, say, CiteSeer or PubMed, and these searches are too narrow. So the authors propose AcadeME, a meta-search engine for academic resources. More...