By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why This Internet Thing is Just Starting
So I'm on the 27th floor of a hotel in downtown Montreal, wrapping up early because I have a flight back to Moncton this evening, and outside my window I see nothing but white. The Air Canada website says my flight is on time, which is no doubt a hopeful fabrication. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CiteULike and Connotea: Linklogging Goes Academic
Mostly a discussion of CiteULike, a system that "lets you build a 'personal library' recording bibliographic information and enabling you to tag papers for future retrieval and group sharing." Of course, that's how OLDaily started - as the output from the links I was saving for my own reference. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students Forced to Carry RFIDs
It is, I suppose, no surprise to find the surveillance society being unrolled first in schools. What is troublesome, of course, is the inevitable drive to use a system that is intended to protect students as a means of controlling students. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community Portals – The UK Experience. A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams?
I understand why the author would say this: "To increase the sustainability of portal projects there is a need to 'work towards establishing common frameworks that will enable applications and services, from different sources, to work together.'" After all, it is precisely that failure that accounts for the indifferent success of community portals, the 'field of dreams' scenario, where you build it, and they do not come. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. edna-for-schools, 8 February
It's the start of another new school year in Australia and as teachers sit down to plan the new year they can't go wrong if they being with the EdNA newsletter, a fantastic resource that in the space of a few hundred words puts teachers in context, connects them to resources, and gives them something to think about. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Trackback is Dead, Use PubSub
From Roland Tanglao (just to prove I'm not the only person saying this): trackback is dead. "Trackback is broken, and I concur. It was broken right from the start, but we didn't know it because it seemed to work, or at least, work the way most people thought it should work." I don't know whether PubSub will be the long-term answer. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. California Unveils Bill to Provide Openly Licensed, Online College Courses for Credit
Cable reen, Creative Commons, March 14, 2013
A logical next step for MOOCs. California introduces a bill that "will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties" (note 'CA' here stands for 'California', not 'Canada'). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education
Noam Chomsky, AlterNet, March 12, 2013
I thought Chomsky over-reached with Syntactic Structures, but since the days of Manufacturing Consent there is very little Chomsky writes with which I would disagree. It doesn't take a lot of analysis of the language to draw the same conclusions he does. The same with the current piece. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care
Gerd Kortemeyer, EDUCAUSE Review, March 4, 2013
Wait... what? Actually, the headline overstates the case. Here is is, precisely: "OERs have failed to significantly affect the day-to-day teaching of the vast majority of higher education institutions. Traditional textbooks and readings still dominate most teaching venues even though essentially all students are online: Course management systems are used only for the dissemination of syllabi, class notes, general communications, and as a grade book." The article nicely lists some adoption hurdles: discoverability, quality, last mile, acquisition. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peers lament open access 'confusion'
Paul Jump, Times Higher Education, February 22, 2013
Britian's House of Lords has released a report critical of Research Council UK's recent policy on open access. It said that there was not enough consultation beforehand, that the policy wasn't articulated clarly enough, and that RCUK should have calculated the costs fo recommending a 'gold' model for open access, which requires that researchers or funders pay publishers to support open access. More...