By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. mIDm - Self-Identification the World Wide Web
Yesterday I wrote that authentication is not needed and not desired - self-identification would do the trick. Today I would like to explain how a system of self-identification would work. Moreover, I provide in this article some samples of working code and a demonstration that prove that the sort of system I am describing is possible. More...

Le monde du web est en tension, entre confort de navigation avec des expériences « utilisateur » de plus en plus riches et dynamiques et une progressive prise de conscience et envie d’anonymat, comme le montre la popularité des bloqueurs de publicité ou de script (des extensions comme Ghostery, Privacy Badger ou NoScript). Plus...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facilitating the Social Annotation and Commentary of Web Pages
The idea behind digital annotation is that readers of a web page or document can place comments into the context of the article, like footnotes or marginalia, rather than at the end. It's a good idea and as you read this article you'll see how much thought has gobe into it over the years. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Video of Teacher's Outburst is on Web
This case is a pretty dramatic illustration of the impact of technology in the classroom: a teacher's apparently inappropriate behaviour finds itself posted as a video on several websites. I don't think banning phones in the classroom is the correct response. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Weeknote 36/2014
Doug Belshaw, 2014/09/11
Doug Belshaw has interviewed a number people (including me) over the last week or so on the topic of the Mozilla Web Literacy Framework. He writes, "I’m starting the ball rolling towards a v2.0 update of the Web Literacy Map (which looks prettier here in the Webmaker resources section). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases
Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, 2014/08/18
I don't think there's a "war" on trolls, exactly (the last thing the world needs is another war) but it seems  clear that the web is becoming increasingly uncivil. But rather than simply blaming the usual culprits - users and trolls - I invite readers to consider some related items to question whether it's a structural defect:

• Reddit launches 'pressiquette' guidelines for journalists - "Reddit, the social news site, is encouraging journalists who use it to follow new guidelines on ethical sourcing... Gawker reported that more than 4,000 BuzzFeed posts have been removed from the site."
• What happens to #Ferguson affects Ferguson - leave aside the presumption that #Ferguson should be international news (it shouldn't). This is nonetheless an important discussion of the idea of algorithms deciding what is important.
• Twitter vows to 'improve our policies'... - "Internet trolls bullied Robin Williams' daughter off of Twitter and Instagram just days after her father's death."
• I liked everything on Facebook for two days... - "After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages... My feed become a cavalcade of brands and politics and as I interacted with them, Facebook dutifully reported this to all my friends and followers."
• The Internet's Original Sin - "Cegłowski explains, 'We’re addicted to ‘big data’ not because it’s effective now, but because we need it to tell better stories.' So we build businesses that promise investors that advertising will be more invasive, ubiquitous, and targeted and that we will collect more data about our users and their behavior."

 It's not simply that there are trolls and it's not simply that our privacy is now for sale, but rather, it's that the fruits of this surveillance are being put to purposes that are mean, nasty and corrosive. More...