By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How the World Was Populated
This is a very nice animation, displaying the spread of the human population across the globe through history, connecting the story with the artifacts and artwork that documents the history. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Good LORd
James Farmer cites D'Arcy Norman: "A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side). I think it's fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically." Well yes. Farmer suggests people don't add content to these institutional repositories because it does nothing for them (and we're all pretty selfish, he says). And "you may, actually, shudder, need to employ a genuine human bean of sorts." Yet people have creted millions of blog posts, podcasts and videos without being paid. So what's up? People like to create content, and thy like to help each other - they aren't inherently selfish; there's lots of evidence to show they want to share, even if there's no benefit to themselves. What they don't feel the need to do, though, is to provide institutional-type content to institutional-type repositories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How has Information Changed?
Tom Hoffman's observations - that this post is not about the nature of information at all - are on point. But the post is illustrative of common misconceptions about the changing nature of media. Of these, forst is probably the confusion between 'information' and 'content'. By 'content' we can mean the messages sent over various media, including television, tabloid newspapers, email, radio, and the rest. But not all of this content is information - if the message is one you've already heard, or if the message is of no use to you, then it is not 'information'. To be information, the content needs to change your understanding of the world (cf. Fred Dretske). A second misconception is in the confusion between the medium and the information. If the information is 'Paris is the capital of France', the medium - be it networked, physical, overwhelming - does not change this information. Paris remains the capital of France. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenCourseWare Consortium Forum
Mentioned today at the conference in Taiwan. John Dehlin gave me credit and thanked me for spurring this on, which was a nice gesture. Still in its early stages, but it's goot to see a place for people to discuss open courseware and the consortium. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canon Rock
A link came through email the other day to this video on YouTube. It was noted that the artist would not have ben able to get anything like the same exposure in the pre-YouTube days (not, I would say, without signing his life away in a recording contract). How much exposure? Try (as of right now) 21,637,087 views, 68883 comments (including one from me) and favorited: 153324 times. I like th video because it really bridges rock and classical music in a way that makes each accessible to fans of the other. As it turns out, there is a whole 'Canon Rock' culture out there, as I discovered when I searched for more background, including jerryc, who I guess wrote the adaptation, as well as numerous others. Here's a New York Times article from a year ago on the videos, and a blog post. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. And the Big News Is...
James farmer is giving up his day job. Yup, the founder of Edublogs is quitting his job at The Age (an Australian newspaper) and devoting himself full-time to Edublogs. "There are currently over 76,000 blogs on the sites and over 1100 new ones every week," he writes. I think this is fantastic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Things I Don'T Like About the Mac
I am in 's-Hertogenbosch, Holland, and quite jet-lagged. Just before I left I wrote this summary of things that bother me about my new MacBook Pro. The responses are not surprising - and thanks to everybody who took the time to helpfully comment on my list. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour May 28, 2007 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 834 Tips for Successful Online Instruction
Now available without subscriptions or registrations or anything creating a barrier between you and the 71 page PDF (which is how it should be) the -learning Guild's tips are short and oddly numbered but certainly good conversation-starters and doubtless contain nuggets of information for most readers. Interesting ad-supported model of distribution which, in this format, is no more annoying than a magazine. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Quebec Budget Released On USB Keys
When I first started at Assiniboine Community College in 1995 with a mandate to promote the use of the internet, I proved my point by emailing a full-text copy of the budget to everyone in the college who wanted it - while the budget was being read in the House of Commons. This is a tactic of the same ilk - the release of the Quebec budget on USB drives instead of paper. Not only does it cost a third what the paper version would cost, you can cut and paste information - and when you're done, you have some handy Flash memory that you can use, say, to put your resume on at that new job interview. More...