By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RSS Is a Gateway Format...
Brian Lamb narrowly escapes after giving another presentation on distrib uted content networks. "The attendees refrained from pelting us with rocks and garbage, but didn't seem all that into it either." I feel you, Brian. Remember a lot of this is still at the seed-planting stage. The ideas will germinate. For those who weren't there, Brian Lamb provides the audio and presentation wiki. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Mill
Worth a look: Interesting software, written in Python, sort of half way between a blog and a wiki. "LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing open and free learning resources. LeMill is independent server software that is hosted for free for anyone at http://lemill.net and that can be downloaded freely. LeMill is also part of the European Schoolnet's Learning Resource Exchange Portal developed in the European (IST) Calibrate project. In the Calibrate project LeMill is part of the EUN LRE Portal, and referred as the 'Learning Toolbox', since it is a tool used for working collaboratively with resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Standardising the Widgets
Scott Wilson points to this interesting page from the W3C about standardizing for widgets (a widget is a stand-alone application you can embed in other applications, like a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA). Quite a bit of the widget standard exists already - things like Javascript (aka ECMAScript) and the Document Object Model (DOM). W3C wants to add things like a manifest, packaging format, and widget API. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Education. Myth or Reality?
Noureddine Elmqaddem, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2019/02/15
This paper (9 page PDF) makes the very good point that virtual relaity (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been around for decades and haven't produced any great revolution in education to date. So why should we believe recent pronouncements about the coming ascendancy of these old technologies. Noureddine Elmqaddem argues (with examples) that recent advances in these technologies will move them from educational myth to reality. "What has been said till now about these technologies does not show their actual potential. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Augmented Reality based Educational Design for Children
Minghui Sun, Xinyu Wu, Zhihua Fan, Liyan Dong, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2019/02/15
This paper (10 page PDF) considers several aspected of augmented reality (AR) design: the sort of detection needed (which, in this case, does not use depth, but merely focuses on fingertips), and the sort interaction that should be supported (based on interviews with children). This is framed in the context of work with a motion controller called Leap Motion, "which can specifically recognize fingers and interact with gestures." The paper's results should be considered prelimiary only. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Taxonomy of Blockchain Technologies: Principles of Identification and Classification
Paolo Tasca, Claudio J. Tessone, Ledger, 2019/02/15
This paper (39 page PDF) doesn't talk about the applications of Bitcoin or Ethereum, nor even about the specifics of particular currencies. Instead it looks at blockchain (aka 'distributed ledger') technologies in general, identifies major types of features, and creates a taxonomy using them. Features include, for example, identity management, consensus, or fee and reward systems. As such it's a good overview of the underlying technologies, though it will require some familiarity with blockchain to read. The taxonomy looks good to me and accords generally with what I've seen extant. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the JavaScript
Jason Rodriguez, CSS-Tricks, 2019/02/13
This post talks about one developer's journey to learn - or in this case, not learn - Javascript. This is not an easy journey in 2019, as the reference to these developer roadmaps makes clear. These roadmaps are similar to the roadmap to learning Solid I pointed to yesterday (it's interesting to see the developer community independently discover something like the mechanism of learning design for developer roadmaps, albeit without all the overhead (such as roles) that educational institutions introduce). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LCB April Question - Leave a Clean Corpse
This month's Learning Circuits Big Question is: "ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors - What Should They Do?" (For those not familiar with the relentless jargon coming out of LC: ILT stands for Instructor-Led Training - the question seems to address both companies that produce educational software and companies that provide training courses). Anyhow, the best answer by far comes from Tom Haskins: "leave a clean corpse." heh. "Now that we are on a roll of learning from internal blogging or subscribing to RSS feeds, tags and searches -- it seems antiquated to pretend that identified skill gaps from a training needs analyses could have a clue about what can be cooked up today, between us, to get better results than yesterday." More discussion of the corpse response. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Edu-RSS Viewer
Thanks everyone for all the kind emails that came my way today. I wanted to respond with a present with my own but instead spent the day elbow deep in Google's dysfunctional Blogger API. Changes to both Blogger and Google's APIs have rendered most Perl code using them obsolete, and I was trying to build my autoblog feature before I left for Boston. Alas, no. But I want to let you see this anyhow, because it's the beginning of the next iteration of what I think the PLE will look like (well, without the "Stephen's Web" branding, of course). Just be kind, because it's very much a work in progress. As soon as I turn the feature on, the viewer will recognize logged-in users and will show only recent Edu-RSS posts. It will also let you rate them. The viewer format allows people to skip through the posts very quickly. The links to blogs and topics also display in the viewer. I will be adding a lot to this basic platform in the future - results ordering by rating, interactivity with other applications, OpenID, and more. I'll be showing the system at the conference on Thursday. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web April 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Edu_RSS, Interaction, RSS, Web Logs, Google, Branding, Blogger]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Apples and Pears
Interesting - maybe eLearning Guild is changing its orientation a bit. I'm speaking at their conference in Boston next week (and sneaking a side-trip to MIT while I'm there, where I plan to lurk in the hallways like a troll). But even more significantly, I learn that they're now including open source software Moodle in their LMS awards - and the little PHP program that could is sweeping them up. Now author Clive Shepherd says the comparison is not warranted because Moodle is a VLE, not an LMS. I don't agree - nothing would prevent you from using Moodle as an LMS, but most of its operators don't want that level of control. More...