By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alexander Hayes[Edit][Delete]: [M]applications : Mobile Learning Inquisition, May 25, 2006
Sometimes the best conversations take a few months to gell. Like this one. Responding to January 4 post from Alec Hayes, Stephanie Rieger opines that we do not see student generated mobile content because "making mobile content right now is cost-prohibitive and available only to those with large budgets." That was in January (and Rieger's blog abrubtly stops there, sadly). This week, Hayes responded with an outburst against commercial MMS offerings ("Why should we be charged $0.50 per MMS message when collectively we can realise learning outcomes and engage our students with ease and authenticity?") and assertions that mobile content is within the reach of the average content creator. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Joe Clark[Edit][Delete]: To Hell with WCAG 2, A List Apart [Edit][Delete] May 23, 2006
Well known for his writing on accessibility, Joe Clark slams the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 recently announced for comment. How often does this happen to standards bodies: "The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson[Edit][Delete]: Personal Information and Identity - Some Categories, May 22, 2006
It's mostly just a description of the vocabulary associated with identity, but a close reading provides the reader a good understanding of the nature and complexity of identity on the web. The trick, in both identification and profiling, is to make these concepts work together in a way that is both useful and that preserves privacy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kathleen Gilroy and Bill Ives[Edit][Delete]: Preparing for Intranet 2.0, the otter group [Edit][Delete] May 16, 2006
Good paper showing how web 2.0 technologies (and especially blogging) can be used in a corporate context. Contains one of the best one-paragraph descriptions of a learning network I've seen: "A learning network uses the intranet as a platform to tie together a set of services that support collaboration and communication, and it uses the web 2.0 tools we ve described so far". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Morris[Edit][Delete]: iBeebSpacr 2.0, May 16, 2006
Tom Morris comments on the BBC's widely publicized plan to embrace Web 2.0 technologies: "What the BBC don't seem to understand is that user-generated content is happening all around them, and that we don't need 'BBC Blogs' or 'BBC Flickr' or 'BBC YouTube' for that to happen." Quite right, and as Catherine Howell observes in her follow-up to her Facebook.edu" post, "we don't need institutional versions of them, squirrelled away in a CMS, either." She goes on to observe that "For the older academics, identity is protected through restricting access to it; by using the language of privacy and confidentiality to talk about it; by preferring password-protected environments". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nancy White[Edit][Delete]: It is KEWL and KINKY: Collaboration Software, Full Circle Online Interaction Blog [Edit][Delete] May 15, 2006
Well this headline will set off the email filters. That's why you should whitelist domains you know are safe. Anyhow, this item describes a new software release from the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources project (AVOIR), "a sophisticated group-based collaboration system, supporting an unlimited number of groups... where you have complete control over what functionality is installed, as well as what functionality is available on a per group basis. You can use kGroups to replace wikis, blogs, content management, mailing lists, document management, instant messaging, discussion forums, and dozens of other applications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Joan Vinall-Cox[Edit][Delete]: Reading is Visual, Learning Landscape [Edit][Delete] May 15, 2006
I had the pleasure of meeting Susan E. Metros in Tennessee (see my pictures from Murfreesboro and Nashville), where she presented much the same material summarized in her EDUCAUSE article on visual literacy. To me, the idea that there is a visual design vocabulary suggests that we have non-symbolic ways of knowing, something that resonates with my thoughts about a new literacy. In this item, Joan Vinall-Cox observes, "After all, reading is a visual act, tied to visual perception. We judge a piece of writing initially, before we decode even one word, by what it looks like. More...