By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laura Blanken[Edit][Delete]: Corporations, Education, Blogging, What Does it all Mean, Geeky Mom [Edit][Delete] August 1, 2006[

Barbara Ganley reports on the recent BlogHer conference and comments, "rumbling through the two days was, as Laura points out, a strong whiff of the almighty dollar. People were looking for hints on increasing traffic to their blogs, making money blogging, encouraging advertisers. In sessions I attended, and in the buzz around the pool, there was a whole lot of attention paid to getting people to your blogs. Fascinating. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Elliotte Rusty Harold[Edit][Delete]: Must Ignore vs. Microformats, The Cafes [Edit][Delete] July 19, 2006

Article comparing microformats to plain ordinary XML markup and concluding that microformats come out on the short end. "Microformats bring exactly nothing to the table. All they do is complexify the markup and make it far harder to address with XPath and other XML tools." Well, maybe. Browsers mostly read XML (there are some issues) but content creators don't mostly write XML. At least, so the proponents of microformats - who happen to be the people behind Technorati, which reads HTML, and not XML - would argue (Update: and in fact did argue). The concept of structured data is good. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Joan Vinall-Cox[Edit][Delete]: Inquiry-Based Learning: What Does That Mean?, Joan Vinall-Cox : Weblog [Edit][Delete] July 19, 2006
On the day before my hiatus last spring I responded testily to John Clare, who asked, in essence, how we know all this online learning mumbo jumbo actually works.
Over the last couple of days I've linked to some similar questioning from Tony Karrar about informal learning (or as it is sometimes styled, free-range learning (which always leads me to think of that cannibalistic Simpsons Halloween episode - but I digress). And pedagogical scepticism seems all the rage. Witness, for example, the growing popularity of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark's paper in Educational Psychologist, Why minimally guided instruction does not work. The recent study being held to conclude that laptops don't help learning. And meanwhile we have Joan Vinall-Cox wrestling with commentary from Rochelle Mazar questioning the efficacy of inquiry-based learning.
Now I know these criticisms are not all of the same thing, but they all take pretty much the same tack. And it seems to me the correct way to respond is found in Vinall-Cox's response. She writes, "When a theory becomes a phrase, and that phrase is defined differently by various 'experts', watch out!" Quite so - and it seems to me that what is being countered by these arguments is not a theory, but a slogan. As Harold Jarche responds, "there is no single methodology for informal learning." And as he notes, there's no simple outcome either. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tony Karrer[Edit][Delete]: Better Questions for Learning Professionals, eLearning Technology [Edit][Delete] July 18, 2006
My online presentation for today was delayed until Thursday due to technical issues, which is just as well, because Tony Karrer has come out with a set of "better questions". For example, "How can I provide a development process, tools and systems that foster informal learning in a way that I know will have impact on the performance that I care about and that is repeatable?" But - again - who is the "I" in this question? The learner? The teacher? The CEO. More...