By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Hoffman[Edit][Delete]: Stoically Working Through This Bad Inheritance, eSchool News [Edit][Delete] January 12, 2006

Responding to Miguel Guhlin's Banishing Disillusionment post, Tom Hoffman quotes at length from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd. It's a good quote, looking at what progressive education hoped to achieve and explaining, via the weight of history, why social revolutions such as this are not fulfilled. Someone more technocratic, such as myself, would turn to Thomas Kuhn to find the observation that revolutions are accomplished only via the passing of previous generations. Revolution is romantic, but the reality is that a society is changed only one mind at a time, one heart at a time, and that this is necessarily a slow process, even in an age of rapid change. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Anna Muoio[Edit][Delete]: The Secrets of Their Success - and Yours, Fast Company [Edit][Delete] January 12, 2006

I don't seek to achieve 'success' in the sense usually intended by any of these commentators - for me, 'success' is a very specific emotional state, a mixture of happiness, harmony and satisfaction. Hard to explain. And for me, very elusive. Still, much of what is described in this article describes the external conditions that (sometimes) lead to the achievement of that state. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens[Edit][Delete]: Meaning Making, Learning, Subjectivity, Connectivism Blog [Edit][Delete] January 12, 2006

I keep postponing this link because I want to write a response to this. But maybe I should just post the link and let it speak for itself, saying for now only that George Siemens questions my assertions about the subjectivity of knowledge. "I'm comfortable stating that everything we see/do is personally interpreted. In many cases, however, an objective concept exists as a tempering point for assigning value to my subjectivity." I'll get my chance to discuss this with him online shortly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ellyssa Kroski[Edit][Delete]: The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, InfoTangle [Edit][Delete] January 12, 2006

Good introduction to the concepts of folksonomy and tagging, though if you are familiar with the topic you won't learn a lot that's new. Especially useful is the list of advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies. The author concludes, correctly, "The advantages to top-down hierarchical taxonomies for library collections are without question. For cataloging the Web, however, they just aren't feasible." A lot of people working on traditional (structured and formal) semantic web applications will learn this the hard way. More...