Opinions

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jean Adams: Thinking About Learning as a Bonusable Objective, Learning Circuits September 24, 2005

Seriously, how can you expect readers to take us seriously when you use a work like 'bonusable' in a headline? Moreover, if you "ask learners to document and report visible signs of learning results that can be used to measure progress. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Matt Barton: Onward, Wiki Soldiers: Let's Liberate Composition, Kairosnews September 24, 2005
I don't really like the title (people seem unaware of how much military metaphors have permeated culture) but rest of it reaches me in all the right ways. The author explains, "It begun when I read RIP-OFF 101, a report detailing how the textbook industry is inflating the costs of college textbooks by a variety of means, most of them devious. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Comments on REL patents, Third-Party Standards, and MPEG LA
A fascinating email sent by Steve Rowat to the ODRL-interest mailing list. Rowat first notes that he left the patent business because "I no longer felt morally justified in being part of an industry that routinely stole from, blocked, or in other ways interfered with inventors who legitimately owned their own creation." I have often expressed this view of the patent industry, but it is unusual to see an insider express it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beyond the Horseless Carriage: Harnessing the potential of ICT in education and training
Written in April and released some time later (the first blog cite is from elearnopedia June 30, which I missed, and then just today in elearnspace - they should add RSS to this page), this paper, written by the CEO of education.au, is more important for the direction it signals than what it says. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Persistent Identity (or not)
Nils Peterson looks at the question of persistent identity - picking up from my commentary on Catherine Howell's reply to Andrew Middleton. He asks, "how do I know that 'fratboy' on aol and 'cougar21' at Washington State University are the same individual?" Well, fair enough - and one would think that if 'fratboy' said "I am Nils Peterson" and 'cougar21' said "I am Nils Peterson" that this should be good enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students Say High Schools Let Them Down
Well I may as well link to the new York Times article; everyone else has. I like Jeremy Hiebert's take: "What interests me about these kinds of articles is the lack of vision for what might work better -- usually the only idea is to raise standards and test more aggressively". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers
I think this item will be popular, but I'm uncomfortable with it. Enough of the advice is good but it seems to me that some of it is misleading. Like, say, this: "Emotions provide the metadata for a memory. They're the tags that determine how important this memory is." Well, no. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could We Have A Little More, uh, Conversation?
Tom Hoffman argues that the educational blogosphere is less developed than other areas because there's not enough conversation going on. Writers, for example, "chirpily" approve links like Andy Carvins's recent suggestion on how to use a wiki to teach students. Carvin's "whole premise" seems to be "that Wikipedia entries... have a non-trivial number of unambiguous factual errors." Well, no. What Carvin in fact says is that "either they'll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they'll prove that it's not." Either way works fine. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christopher T. Cross: Time Out, Edutopia August 30, 2005
The traditional scheduling of school classes - starting at nine, each one running for fifty minutes - depends on the dubious asumption, as the author notes, that "students arrive at school ready to learn in the same way, on the same schedule, all in rhythm with each other." Not only that, the author also bemoans the gradual shrinkage of learning time. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Habits of Judgment and Authority
Something to think about. A librarian quoted by Will Richardson says, "I've been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don't really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not". More...