By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Researchers Question School in High-Tech Age
A standard education-reform article citing Don Tapscott, every newspaper's favorite tech author. The usual stuff, but I want to focus on this (I know you've seen it before): "Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. M-Learning: Two Years: Two Life Times
Alexander Hayes at his best, linking the technology with the people with the vision. "Despite the organizational reluctance to engage... our esteemed colleagues charge on... extraordinary people with great courage and foresight who link research with practice." A lyrical presentation that at one highlights numerous projects and people working on mobile learning and which may also contain the longest single sentence in the history of presentations. And it strikes me again how disappointing it is that we has some of the most expensive mobile phone rates in the world here in Canada, a short-sighted policy that has slowed adoption and stifled research. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching How To Learn
Thanks to Michael Coghlan for sending this shortish video of Tony Buzan talking on the subject of teaching children how to learn, with a focus on creativity. I am pretty much in agreement with his argument. I have been creative all my life, and I have seen how it is depicted as "not normal" and discouraged throughout the educational process. But as Buzan argues, "'normal' is not natural... we are teaching uncreativity." Good video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What's All the Buzz About Wikibooks? I Found at Least 10 Examples.
Curt Bonk offers us a look at a promising alternative to the textbook, the wiki book. Essentially, the wiki book is an online book written collectively by its readers. Bonk's post is a valuable contribution because it lists and describes in some detail ten separate wiki books projects. This gives readers some concrete examples they can consider following. Bonk is working on a book applying Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat ideas to learning. Richard Hoeg takes the same tack with this post and presentation (which is worth the six minutes to view). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Call for a Textbook Purchasing Moratorium
I have been calling on libraries to stop purchasing books and journals, and to instead coordinate the open archiving of the content produced by the instutution they serve. This call from Wesley Fryer on schools mto stop purchasing textbooks is in a similar vein - the practice is wasteful and expensive and isn't preparing children for the future. "Education cannot and will not change in the basic, fundamental ways we need and should want it to change in the twenty-first century as long as textbooks, paper, and pencils continue to be the predominant technologies for student expression and individualized access to content". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
"In the arts," argue the authors, "the pathetic fallacy is the act of ascribing human feelings to inanimate objects." The same sort of fallacy is informing internet data representations. "On the semantic web... researchers are (perhaps subconsciously) allowing the computer's internal representation of data to influence the way their tools present information to users." Specifically, the authors decrie the overuse of the "Big Fat Graph (BFG)." Note the terminology again: "By graph, we mean representations with nodes [ie., entities] and edges [ie., links] to model the relationships within the space represented". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mugshot
This is a new site from red Hat that allows you to "Show updates from all your sites on one page, get live updates from friends [and to] share content from MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, blogs and more." I think I made an account here a while back; I don't recall writing about it. Or maybe not; the YouTube account ('Downes') isn't mine. Maybe it made it for me? Anyhow, here's my Mugshot page. Related: code on openfriendformat.com that takes your contact data from networks like Digg and Del.icio.us and creates FOF files out of it. Example. Why isn't Facebook on the list? because Facebook doesn't share. See also Phillip Pearson on decentralized social networking. And on the idea of pulling together your different social networks under one OpenID, see ClaimID. More...