By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web
What happens when the 3D web begins to interact with our usual ways of interacting with the world and each other? This report describes in detail the possible scenarios, from augmented reality to mirror worlds, lifelogging, political change and the transparent society. Lots of detail, illustrations and examples. Very comprehensive. The 28 page report is available as a PDF. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them
Part One, Part Two. Good set of suggestions concerning the founding of social networks (which are interestingly almost the same as the set of suggestions that would apply to the founding of online communities). Baically, the advice amounts to: provide something of value to your members, attend to them personally, and keep focusing on the value to members. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vendor-Driven Misperceptions About Web 2.0 in Schools
"Educational technology staff are probably the greatest single enemy of Web 2.0 connectivity and collaborative tools in schools." So says The Education Bazaar, looking at the "misinformation" being spread about these technologies in publications such as Computerworld. Why such misinformation? Well, it could be the companies that profit by it - companies like IBM who want to sell proprietary versions of Web 2.0 technology ("the new Quickr 8, Lotus Connections and Info 2.0 products are part of IBM's new 'Web 2.0 Goes to Work' initiative) and need to scare organizations off the open source stuff available now. Or it could be the people quoted by these magazines, such as Vijay Sonty, not only "CIO for Broward County Public Schools in Sunrise, Fla." and "this year's Withrow Award for Educators" but is also "on the IBM Customer Advisory Panel" and who "says that Web 2.o tools are not ready for schools" - at least, not in comparison to the IBM tools. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Britannica Blog: Web 2.0 Forum
Nothing like a little deliberately seeded contrarians to drive up the hit counter to what would otherwise be an unremarkable site. Britannica has Andrew Keen and Michael Gorman telling us how stupid Wenb 2.0 is, and Clay Shirky offering the reply, with some others playing supporting roles. The whole point of the exercise, of course, is to reinforce the role of the authority through these high-profile postings. Yawn. We've seen it before. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development
Today's newsletter is a bit late because - once again - a video project ran away with my time. This time, it was the content for a talk I'm giving to the British Council tomorrow. The audience will see the video in the morning, and then chat with me by Skype in the afternoon. I had really wanted the video to be more - I made it using Camtasia (my first with that software) and I wanted to add screencasts showing the Web 2.0 tools being used. But the audio track was attached to the PIP, which meant I couldn't cut from the webcam video to the screencam without losing my soundtrack - sure, it could be fixed, but not in the time I had. But I'll get better at this. I am also scheduled to appear at an event in Second Life tomorrow - here is the SLURL (SLURL stands for Second Life URL). Stephen Downes, Google Video June 18, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Web 2.0, Video, Audio, Great Britain, Project Based Learning, Google, Newsletters, Chatrooms, Audio Chat and Conferencing]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web 2.0 Driven SECI Model Based Learning Process
The diagram in this post reminds me of my old 'knowledge - learning - community' diagrams from 2001 or so. There's still something to that, I think. In this case, the cycle is something like "externalization - communication - internalization - socialization". "After 15 years," writes the author, "Web 2.0 concepts seem to be an ideal fit with Nonaka's SECI approach opening new doors for more personal, dynamic, and social learning on a global scale". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Challenges of the Semantic Web
Podcast based on the recent eWeek article on the semantic web. Author Jim Rapoza questions Tim Berners-Lee, Eric Miller and me. A lot more detailed than the eWeek article. The responses in defense of the semantic web leave me a bit cold. It seems to me that what they are depending on is some mechanism whereby proprietary data can be 'hooked' into RDF, via a pointer, or translated into RDF, via XSLT. That seems to me to be a bit of a diluted semantic web. And even so, to also be a bit hopeful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Government Education Portal
According to the website, "The Government Education Portal points the way to authoritative online resources, news and events about education and training in Australia." I searched for 'Downes' (that's how I test such systems) and obtained exactly two results. I couldn't find a list of sites indexed (seems to me an OPML list should be a basic requirement these days). No RSS feed either, so there's no way to find out when new materials have been added. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wired but Not Web 2.0: A Brief Look at the Pew/Internet Study On Adult ICT Use
Good summary of the latest Pew study (though I will admit to being peeved by their sole focus on American internet usage - a more international outlook would be much more useful, even for Americans). Also, "kids and teenagers were not part of this study," which really skews the results. This one has cute names, like 'omnivore' and 'connector' to describe different types of use. Sessums offers some analysis of the results, suggesting "you might consider a weekly weblog or listserv newsletter to keep parents apprised of classroom activities and events." Um, hm. More...