By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Free Camtasia
I've heard from several sources that free licenses for Camtasia 3.1.3 are available. The current version is Camtasia Studio 5.0 and if Camtasia thinks that this give-away will spur demand for the more advanced software, they're right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Giant Global Graph
The social graph as described by Brad Fitzpatrick is, according to Tim Berners-Lee, the semantic web. "I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!" And it's a way, not of creating technology, but a way of thinking. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LOM Re-Synch
Activity is beginning to heat up again around the whole learning object metadata (LOM) scene. There is the Dublin Core educational metadata (DC-ED) meeting I missed today, but which I will be following. And as Erik Duval writes, "Over the last year or so, there has been quite a bit of discussion on how we want to make LOM evolve over the longer term." What I really like - and what I really encourage - is that these will be open meetings, hosted online using FlashMeeting (which mostly works with every browser these days). I plan to be there, but even if I miss the meeting, it will still be accessible later, so I can follow what happened. Here's a meeting on metadata harmonization that took place Monday. I don't know yet whether there's a common calendaring system for these meetings that will let people (say) subscribe to a feed and pick which meetings to schedule to attend. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndication Dragging Us Down... (a Rant)
Tom Hoffman comments on the slow adoption of syndication. "We aren't seeing what we thought we'd be seeing: individual sites exchanging data in a wide variety of ways. We're seeing big sites that pass the data around internally very effectively and also offer their own API's, but not so much common, open standards." No, we're seeing silos. We have always known there would be silos, and always argued against them. I know, you don't have to believe me - and many don't (I just got a snark in my email for not supporting a centralized video conferencing solution). But silos are winning, right now, because most of the peer-to-peer stuff was made illegal or blocked by providers. There was a period of time when it would have seemed a lot more reasonable to bet the farm on Compuserve or GEnie or Prodigy, not against some low-tech peer to peer stuff like Fido-Net or ARPA. That was then. ARPA became the internet, and the silos became history. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. This Whole Syndication Thing Is Sucking Me Down the Drain...
Brian Lamb ponders the place of syndication in the world. "I blog merrily along, talking about the power of syndication to anyone who will listen... and I'm still trying to achieve what seemed to be just around the corner four years ago... I've had remarkably good luck the past few years with grant applications and conference proposals. But so far, each submission that's focused on RSS or syndication in any way has been rejected -- come to think of it, these have been my only failures." My own work on syndication is similarly unfunded. People want web services and digital rights management and competencies, but few people - few funders, at least - want to see open resource sharing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. UniProt, URNs, PURLs
This just so neatly underscores my own view, and hnce, my opposition to things like CORDRA: "the draft W3C Technical Architecture Group finding URNs, Namespaces and Registries, which addresses the questions 'When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?' and 'Should registries be provided for such identifiers?'. The answers given are 'Rarely if ever' and 'Probably not'." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Addicted to Audio?
Here are some interesting thoughts:
Visuals + audio = persuasion
Text + silence = learner control
Narration narrows cultural appeal
Cathy Moore adds: 'Also, narration puts a cultural stamp on your materials. A Flash that could be global gets a blatant 'Made in America' label when I narrate it." I still remember the 'learn Spanish' CD I bought once. It sounded like an Atlanta baseball game. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. More Bogus Percentages. This Time On Wikipedia
It is worth reporting (since this newsletter has a reasonably wide readership) once again that the famous 'cone of experience' is a hoax. I've seen it debunked in several places, and on several mailing lists, over the years. But still it persists - it shows up in academic papers, education guru seminars, and now, most recently, on Wikipedia. Showing, I guess, that nothing is immune. Anyhow, Will Thalheimer has a good set of links showing where it appears and, if you scroll down, giving it a thorough debunking. More...