By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Arrington[Edit][Delete]: Huh? YouTube Sends TechCrunch a Cease and Desist, Techcrunch [Edit][Delete] November 17, 2006
Hm. YouTube has sent TechCrunch a cease-and-desist letter because TechCrunch was distributing a way for people to save YouTube videos. According to YouTube's lawyer, "YouTube is a streaming-only service. We do not permit users to download the videos we host on our site." Well, this is totally not clear when you upload. And it really erodes the value of the site. Is this because of Google, I wonder. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Blockchain Ready for Prime Time in Education?
Wayne Skipper, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/02/04
The lede is buried near the end of this post: "In early 2018, Concentric Sky and partners BrightHive and the DXtera Institute proposed such a blockchain ecosystem, called EdRec. EdRec is a learner-centric, open standards approach to learning record storage 'on the blockchain,' with self-sovereignty of learner data as its key design principle." What I've l.earned over the last year is that while it's relatively easy to store information in a blockchain, maintaining it as a network is generates wider social and technical issues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Gilbertson[Edit][Delete]: Getting Songs Off An iPod, Monkey Bites [Edit][Delete] November 15, 2006
If you are one of those people who thought your iPod was useful, and then discovered you can't get your songs off them, then these apps are for you: iPod Access and iPod Rip. I also read (but cannot verify) that you can get your songs off an iPod using MS Windows as follows: uninstall any iPod or iTunes software, plug your iPod in to the USB port, turn it on, open 'My Computer', open the 'iPod' directory, navigate iPod's internal directories, copy or move songs. I can confirm that this works both for my Creative Zen (RIP, battery) and my iRiver. Which is nice, because it means I have a 30 gig USB drive that I always carry with me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sean J. C. Lancaster and Paula E. Lancaster[Edit][Delete]: Technology Shaping Learner Dispositions, Australian Flexible Learning Framework [Edit][Delete]Australian Flexible Learning Framework [Edit][Delete]Australian flexible Learning Framework [Edit][Delete] November 14, 2006
A 'disposition' is "...a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way". Philosophically, we would consider a disposition to be an instantiation of a counterfactual property in an individual - it describes what a person would do if stimulated in a certain way. Why do I describe it like this? Well, thus understood, dispositions constitute the central idea in Gilbert Ryle's behaviourist theory of mind. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peter Shanks[Edit][Delete]: ICA05 Deconstructed, Bathurst TAFE [Edit][Delete] November 10, 2006
What I like about this is the way a group of people on the outside show how its done. The focus is the (Australian) ICA05 training package, currently available only as a PDF. The author writes, "I don't have much time for searching through two 600 page PDF documents, cutting and pasting and re-formatting units, and wondered why this information wasn't availiable as a database or an XML file... Well... I had a couple of spare days so I kludged together some code that read the original PDF documents and fed the results into a database... Why stop there? How about: auto-generating moodle module skeletons". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. L.M. Orchard[Edit][Delete]: Firefox 2.0 breaks client-side XSL for RSS and Atom feeds, OXDECAFBAD [Edit][Delete] November 8, 2006
Count me among those who doesn't like Firefox's new way of interpreting RSS feeds. Sure, I hate Feedburner styling. Still, at least I'm getting what I clicked on. The other option is to automatically subscribe to RSS feeds. Don't select that. At first I thought it was convenient. But twice in two days now I've simply wanted to see the content, not to subscribe - and Firefox efffectively made it impossible to see the content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Randolph Decker[Edit][Delete]: Podcasts. What's the Big Deal?, EGram@sd40.bc.ca [Edit][Delete] November 7, 2006
I don't know why. My brain just works in strange ways. But when I read this item, all I could think was: "Folk, folks, if you are going to post audio online, make sure to rewind it first so people can start listening to it right away." A good link, because it introduces us to Tiki Bar, the best looking (video) podcast (which means, technically, it's a vodcast) on the net. I didn't listen, the TV was on. More...