By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Predators and Cyberbullies: Reality Check
A sentence about halfway through says it all for me: "Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million "cases" of teen-to-teen cyberbullying." One wonders why the media is so interested in overemphasizing the former and almost completely ignoring the latter. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Unanticipated Consequence of the $100 Laptop
Well. "One NJ computer coordinator told me that a local school board heard about the $100 laptop and has decided not to buy any new computer hardware until laptops cost $100 in the United States. Now that should really scare the domestic computer industry!" Probably apocryphal. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Universe Is a String-Net Liquid
Too cool not to pass along: "What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long "strings" of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move 'like noodles in a soup' and weave together into huge 'string-nets'." There seems to be some support for this theory, including most spectacularly the production of a new type of matter." My first thought when I read this was "Ewww, I'm made up of noodles." After that response, I realized - there may be much more to me (or anybody) than we realized. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Vision for Wikieducator
Leigh Blackall figures it out. Everybody focuses on wikis. Collaborative creation and all that. But "the problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they're doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media upload somewhere else." OK, good. Then how would you fix this? He goes through a little thinking, and then: "one-way aggregation is only half useful. Being able to quickly and easily compile an information piece on a wiki page from a variety of already existing information and media is great, being able to then quickly edit and add your own information around that media is even better, but to be able to dynamically export that page in true Web2 fashion would be the bomb!" Yes. Exactly. Bring in content from multiple sources. Mash it up, whatever. But instead of requiring that everybody go to your place (which is where these initiatives always go) ship it out in whatever form will be useful to a person and where that person needs it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Revolution Will Be Televised...On YouTube
Larry Downes: "The early signs of a social, political and economic revolution are increasingly visible--copyleft, net neutrality, Web 2.0, the 'privacy debate,' Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, neo-luddism against RFID and the increasingly desperate and increasingly blunt force responses of the vested interests--the DMCA, the Convention on Cybercrime, business process patents, Grokster." Make no mistake. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Matrix
Those familiar with Unix-style permissions will know that it constructs a number out of the biary values for read, write and execute, creating a separate number for each of the owner, group and world. This post extends that mechanism by adding Creative Commons values to it. Hence, "73333: This means that the person can view the open work freely... 77770 Free to access, use, modify, distribute, no guarantee of future freedom". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Twitter THIS!
Twitter is a site that encourages you to blog every five minutes. I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it here before - I may have mentioned Kathy Sierra's twitter curve. No matter. Despite the hype it has gotten in the last few days, there's no there there. The best enhancement to Twitter I've seen is the auto-twitter - software that knows what you should be doing every five minutes or so, and blogs it for you. More...