By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Teachers Don't Use Web 2.0 - an Historical Perspective
I think that Gary Stager has struck at the heart of what's wrong with the 'School 2.0' movement, a movement that is essentially about teachers using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. He is quite right when he says that many of the proponents have no sense of the history of school reform, and certainly no grasp of the grounds for school reform. As it is now, he suggests, the movement is essentially a leaderless group of anti-intellectualists centered around the tools, not any big or deep ideas. There's a lot more in this post, including a history of Logo and a consideration of some of the thinking behind it. This forms the basis for a sustained set of criticisms of the 2.0 crowd that does deserve a reply, not so much because they're incorrect, but because, in being addressed to people like Warlick and Utecht and Richardson, they're really misdirected. What I have called 'e-learning 2.0' is absolutely not about using Web 2.0 in the schools - it is not about preserving existing structures and existing authority. It is about deschooling, not reschooling, and it is about putting the capacity to learn into the hands of indivduals, wherever they may be, not locking them in a room and blocking their internet access. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PRISM: Open Letter to Cambridge University Press
Peter Murray-Rust writes an open Letter to Cambridge University Press on the subject of PRISM. "The language of PRISM it implies that publishing in Open Access journals (as I do on occasions) is 'junk science'," he writes. "There is much more from PRISM which is both deliberately factually incorrect and misleading and I cannot see how a reputable scholarly organisation such as CUP could be associated with it." Quite so! Briuan Vickery, from BioMed Central, also attacks the veracity of PRISM. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Avatars Without Virtual Worlds: an Alternative Platform
Sorry about the unscheduled deliveries of OLDaily this morning. They were the result of unscheduled system reboots while I had the 'send newsletter' window open. I promise that mistakes like this will happen again in the future. Anyhow, how do things like this reach 10 million users before I've even heard of them? Some days I think I'm plugged in, other days I really wonder. Stardoll is a site that lets you create your own doll. Or your own avatar. Bryan Alexander finds this gem: "We spoke with CEO Mattias Miksche in July to discuss the importance of avatars versus virtual worlds, and he emphasized the importance of identity and realism over immersiveness." Which raises the question, do avatars need virtual worlds? And the answer is, of course not. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Instructionally Investing in VoiceThread
Wesley Fryer recommends VoiceThread as a way for classes to capture stories and memories. It looks good. But when I look at their example I'm turned off. Couldn't they have explained it without pictures of a whole bunch of soldiers and guns? Also, the website makes it really difficult to read more information; fortunately, Wesley Fryer provides links like this one to VoiceThread in the classroom. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sideways Computing
There seems to be some momentum developing around a programming languaged called Erlang. The logic of Erlang is very different, and I will confess that I don't get it yet (and of course the syntax is sometimes just pointlessly non-standard - cf the notation for comments). A strength of Erlang is (apparently) that it is much better suited to multi-core processors. But I am also sensing that this is where some of the backlash in the Java community is landing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rogers
As I write today I am in the unusual situation of having access to my website to work but not from home - my server, which is actually based Houston, can be accessed via CA*Net, through which I access the net here, but not through Rogers Internet. So the site is up and working but I can't get to it when I'm at home. Weird. So I'm compiling traceroutes and staying late at the office. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Stale State of Tagging?
People started tagging and got all excited by the idea, and then tagging became associated with certain brands, and then all of a sudden there were 140 different tagging engines, all of which were of course incompatible with each other. The article concludes with an outline of what 'enterprise' needs, which is exactly the wrong way to go, because what makes tagging work - when it works at all - is that it transcends boundaries - exactly what enterprise doesn't do. What we need is interoperability and portability. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adding Arrows to Our Communications Quiver
I don't know why it is that if you add a Japanese name to something you get, almost automatically, a fad, but here it is again with Pecha Kucha. This post is pretty good discussion and extension of the idea (though I think that writing a book about it is a bit ridiculous). And I think that Wayne Hodgins captures the most important element - Pecha Kucha is a game, a silly game. It's fun. There's nothing inherently valuable about the rules - they could be (almost) anything. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikipedia's Imminent Demise?
I've mentioned this in passing elsewhere, but it's time, I think, to say it outright. The managers of Wikipedia have been adding layers of oversight and scrutiny. And they plan to add that allow overseers to vet revisions, which means that most readers will not see a revision until it has been reviewed. This will destroy Wikipedia. People are not going to want to contribute if they know it won't be seen until some (anonymous and unqualified) overseer gets around to 'flagging' it. This means that, more and more, it will be the people with an agenda, rather than the people who just want to add good content, that will be contributing to Wikipedia. It's also not going to be long before there are protracted disputes between the overseers and the common editors. The managers at Wikipedia have to stop listening to the critics. They had a perfectly good encyclopedia because anybody could correct the errors. More...