By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why a Web of Connections—Not a Single Relationship—Should Surround Students
Julia Freeland Fisher, EdSurge, 2018/10/08
After the obligatory opening paragraphs offering a paean to teachers, this article cites to research that "points to relationships more broadly as core determinants of students’ chances of getting by and getting ahead. Research from an array of youth development and social capital scholars is clear: students will most benefit from a web of adults supporting their healthy development, academic success and access to opportunity." One study mentiones is the Search Institute’s work on what they call developmental relationships. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. One Small Step for the Web...
Berners-Lee, Inrupt, 2018/10/01
On Saturday Fast Company broke the story that Tim Berners-Lee was launching a startup to develop and distribute his SoLiD application (which stands for Social Linked Data; I've covered it here before). There was also a Medium post the same day. This is a part of his plan to restore the web to its original decentralized vision. His new company is called Inrupt (which will be way easier to search for than 'solid') and is launching this week. More...

Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café
I love the use of nature photographs in this article to run a parellel threat interspersed with the discussion, which is an aggregation and summary of the critiques of folksonomies. The author's main intent is to defend the careful creation of metadata, and the sloppy and sometimes spammed metadata used in folksonomies is clearly not that. But from where I sit, folksonomies - as implemented by Technorati Tags - conflate two things: first, the idea of user-created classification, and second, aggregation of those classifications by what amounts to a 'push' technology. More...