By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On Groups, Networks and Collectives
Blog post from Terry Anderson, and a companion blog post from Jon Dron, discussing the distinction between groups and networks. So far so good. But they include a third type of entity, 'the collective', with which I'm less comfortable. "Collectives are what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. Collectives are about aggregation. The logic of the collective is that of the set, not the network. A classic piece of collective software would be the recommender system or the tag cloud."
I can see the reasoning here, but the term 'collective' - with all its connotations to the epitome of group formation, communism, is a very bad choice. And to say 'collectives are about aggregation' and then to compare it to a recommender system is to (in my view) misunderstand how recommender systems work. That said - yes, I can see that there is this type of organization, too much like a group (being based on properties and aggregation) to be a network, too much like a network (having no internal cohesion or order) to be a group. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogger's Choice Awards
More awards, and yes, I nominated myself here too, and again, you'll have to find it under pages and pages of nominees. A couple of commercial blogs have jumped into an early lead - and they're the ones you see when you go to vote. Talk about a significant first-mover advantage). Anyhow, like the other award shows, they give you a good place to sample a lot of content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Complacency and Web 2.0
Blogger ditched the Atom API and started with their own system. I still can't connect Edu_RSS to Blogger - the Google tech acknowledges it's their issue, but nothing changes. Should we depend on the tech companies to usher the world of Web 2.0? No. Just the opposite. Here is Google's ideal world - no other company necessary. "A lot of good things happened, innovation blossomed, but now we are entering a more pragmatic phase, where the large players like Google and Amazon who distributed the API elixir are taking control back." And people thought my article on why the Semantic Web will fail was unduly pessimistic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Elderblog Sutra
Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm, 2019/02/13
Reflecting on my post from the other day, Doug Belshaw suggests that OLDaily might be classified as an 'elderblog'. This term is adapted from gaming, where an elder game  is "a game where most players have completed a full playthrough and are focusing on second-order play." For me, No Man's Sky fits this - I've completed the main quests in 'Next' and have advanced to the next galaxy, where I spend my time leisurely exploring and hunting pirates. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blog Opens On the Learner of the Future
Interesting use of a blog. "This year's AoC NILTA national debate focuses on the learner of the future. A debate blog is available online, which discusses the evolving needs of our current and future learners." Can't say much good about the design, though - is the sidebar on the home page just broken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Blogosphere As an Artifact of Distributed Cognition
Over on the other blog today I have posted a longish item called What I am Working On. It's another attempt to explain things like learning networks and distributed cognition (if I try enough times I'll eventually get it, right?). The sorts of things discussed in this article constitute the sorts of things I think about on a day-to-day basis - and while the author is showing how brains are different from computers, there is a flipside, which is, how computers could be the same as brains, but aren't, yet. Lots of room for invention. Like this, for example: "The brain uses content-addressable memory." What does that mean? The author says, "The end result is that your brain has a kind of 'built-in Google.'" Well, yeah. But: "memories are composed of linked sensory fragments -- odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions". More...