By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID - Every Student Should Have One
Summary of the OpenID event that took place in London last Thursday, with links to photos, slides and blog entries. Andy Powell writes, "t seems to me that this is a good example of why the education community stands to gain by going with more mainstream approaches such as OpenID". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interview with Stephen Downes at SURF Education Days 2007
After the SURF Education Days conference in Utrecht Finnish blogger Teemu Arina and I sat down for a conversation in the cafeteria. We discussed my talk - which has raised a bit of a storm in the Netherlands - and what we expect to be doing in 20 years. Teemu was kind enough to record my talk, for which I express my thanks. This post lists eight of the reactions - they're in Dutch, which Google doesn't do - but if you go to Babelfish you can eke out a marginal interpretation. I have also posted my response to Paul Kirshner in the other blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Should I Stay Or...
It's sort of odd to think of a vocabulary test as posing a moment of truth for a blogger, but that seems to be what happened to Miguel Guhlin as on the one hand the blog readability test ranked his writing as 'elementary school' level while in the same post he offers a survey asking whether he should continue blogging. Posting http://www.downes.ca into the reading level meter suggests that it is written at 'genius level' - but if you find that a bit much, you can rest easy knowing that OLDaily.htm comes in at 'high school level. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pathfinder Journeys Now Available
Derek Morrison points to the release of these descriptions and reflections of the 'Pathfinder' projects undertaken at various UK universities. The packages are zip files, which will need to be unpackaged. projects include the Design of the ADELIE Framework for Intervention, at Leicester, and the CABLE Project (for Academy Subject Centre: Health and Sciences Practice) at Hertfordshire. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers - The Set Curriculum
It bears repeating... again: "That's when I realized that, to Julia - one of the best students in my class, one of the best writers - writing was really only about getting a grade. It had no other meaning or purpose. All of her learning was reduced to one thing - the need to achieve a certain average... I realized that my classroom was a place where there was a lot of teaching going on, but not a lot of learning. When talking to me about her work, Julia had used an adopted voice. She spoke about the thesis statement, the hook, about effective support. She used the terminology that I had been using since the beginning of the school year. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 10 Years of Open Content
David Wiley notes, "The 10th anniversary of open content is quickly approaching! The phrase 'open content' was born in the late spring of 1998, and the first open content license was unleashed on the world in July of 1998 (yes, I know this first license was pretty awful - but hey, it was my first attempt!)." He is declaring 2008 to be 'the year of open content'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. McGraw-Hill and ETUDES Form Alliance
This is McGraw-Hill hedging its bets. Not sure what ETUDES gets out of it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) - Summary
I have been studying Kirschner, Sweller and Clark's paper Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. This is in preparation for my talk tomorrow at SURF Education days here in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Hence this short newsletter. Anyhow, this is the summary, and here are some readings (the published responses don't appear at all on Google search and are somewhat expensive). If you have anything to add... I won't be speaking until tomorrow afternoon, your comments would be helpful. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour November 12, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Books, Google]. More...