By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sun Launches Open DRM Project
This headline has been splayed across the IT press sector this week: "Sun Microsystems has launched an ambitious community project aimed at building a universal system of digital rights management based on 'open source' software." But I think the final and authoritative word belongs to (Sun's) Tim Bray: "What all the DRM dreamers don’t want to admit is that 95% or more of the population hasn’t yet encountered DRM, and when they do, they aren’t going to like it". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Mindset of Freshmen
Sure, it's fun to imagine the mind-set of students who are 18 years old today (born in 1987), but really, the list in Inside Higher Ed is pretty lame. A better list? The moon landing ahppened 18 years before they were born (by contrast, World War II ended 14 years before I was born). There has never been a Berlin Wall (fell in 1989) and Russia has always been a (chaotic) democracy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Middle Ground?
Link to an article by Glenn Reynolds calling for an easing of legal restrictions on podcasters ('Lessig concludes: "The existing system is just workfare for lawyers.') and a short response from James DeLong. Following the links will lead you to a really good discussion of standards setting and intellectual property, also by DeLong. Now I don't agree with the stance taken by DeLong and the Progress Freedom Foundation (a too-obvious attempt to obfuscate the name of the Electronic Frontier Foundation); as Derek Slater comments, "They continuously beat the drum of market-based solutions." Slater suggests that 'music rights organizations' which offer blanket licenses or a form of voluntary collective licensing may provide that "elusive middle ground" that almost everyone is searching for. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Lecture - A Teaching Strategy or Cop-Out?
The author offers a short post considering the pedagogical benefits of the lecture as a prelimimary to joining the "Triple A Lecture Invention" learning object project. As she notes in a later post, participants have been drawn from Manitoba, Canada, China and Australia. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Should Be Hard Fun
Albert Ip point to, and quotes at length, Clark Quinn in this article on games in learning. "Learning can, and should, be hard fun!" Quinn lists a set of principles that serve this objective. "The principles work," he observes, but "there's a lot of 'finesse' behind the application." It is this 'finesse' that keeps game design an art form and (consequently) defies mass production. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deconstructed Distributed Conversations
Another entry in the ongoing conversation about using blogs in con versations, as Will Richardson recaps. It seems to me that there's a real skill in writing such recaps, and that if you want to learn about a topic in a hurry, following and summarizing such conversations (whatever the topic) is a good way to go. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Computing Means Connecting
Dave Tosh fills in the vision a little bit more, beginning with the premise that 'computing means connecting' and then articulating that vision via persuasive definition of e-portfolios. Crucil to the concept, he argues, is not merely that they are personal, but also, but that they are personally owned. More...