The Un-Internet
Dave Winer, Scripting News, January 2, 2012.

Dave Winer writes, "I’ve written about it so many times, but that’s how it goes with loops.... At issue is this: Control. For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it." And so, he says, we are entering the look again, this time with microblogging services like Tumblr and tablets like iPad. It's funny - doing a follow-up to find other views, all I find are copies of the Winer post, with nothing else added. More...

Can-Spam Act a Failure
There are some important lessons in this item. "The U.S. Can-Spam Act is a failure... of the 547,685 messages examined, only 71 - 0.013 per cent - complied with Can-Spam." When the internet was first unfolding, advocates argued that it transcended national borders and legal restrictions. More...

Learning Objects in a P2P Cross Institutional Framework
The P2P bit occupies only three short paragraphs near the end of the article and doesn't really satisfy. More...

Brilliance struck. We call it Canvas Catalog.
Matt Goodwin, Canvas by Instructure, May 30, 2014
Instructure is launching a new product called Canvas Catalog, "a white-label platform that enables any institution, government entity, university or K-12 school to create a branded index of online courses." This means, according to the blog post, "any organization using Canvas now has the ability to build a marketplace or storefront for their courses. This gives learners the ability to register, enroll, pay (if that’s your thing), and start taking courses without all the typical hassle." What I'd like to see from this service is an RSS feed - free courses should be freely syndicated (here's a sample RSS-Events file and the RSS-Events schema is available here). More...

DRM and the Challenge of Serving Users
Mitchell, Mozilla Blog, May 29, 2014

One of the reason content companies have been creating their own browsers is to be able to implement in-browser digital rights management (DRM) instead of relying on plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. Open source browsers, such as Mozilla's Firefox, have no such incentive. More...

BoardThing
BoardThing, May 27, 2014

BoardThing looks like an organized person's Pinterest: "Create cards with text or images.Move and arrange cards with collaborators on a shared board. Organize cards into groups.Export your board as HTML, plain text, or outline (OPML)." It's still in private beta. More...

Feature Article
temp upload of audio
Stephen Downes, May 23, 2014.

Enclosure: 2014_05_22_-_Collaboration_and_Cooperation.mp3

Ubiquitous Learning Project Using Life - logging Technology in Japan
Noriko Uosaki, Bin Hou, Mengmeng Li, Hiroaki Ogata, Kosuke Mouri, Songran Liu, Educational Technology & Society, May 22, 2014

You may not think that life-logging and online learning are linked, but if you think of online learning as a ubiquitous services that learns from your every move, you can see how tightly the two may be linked. This paper presents a system called SCROLL (System for Capturing and Reusing of Learning Log). More...

An Alternative Perspective on Group Dynamics
Jenny Mackness, May 16, 2014

In this post Jenny Mackness offers a rethink on the need for group formation. "How could it ever be right to not support the weakest member of the group? ... There were some lovely people in our walking group who shared these values, but also some who didn’t seem to understand that in a situation such as walking the West Highland Way, commitment to the group was important." It's an interesting challenge. More...

Why We Hate Recommending Software Downloads To Our Readers
Editorial, HowToGeek, May 16, 2014
Good article pointing to some of the problems associated with software download sites (and I would add that it's not only freeware - you will be subjected to these scams on pay sites as well). Even good and reliable sites change hads and start doing things like bundling search-hijack services (like Conduit, which actually in stalls software that blocks your attempts to change your search provider back to DuckDuckGo). More...