By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What I Learned About Social Search On Yi-Tan
There has been a lot of movement recently in the field called 'social search', which is: "people helping people find stuff." This article summarizes a discussion (a telephone conference call, no less!) on the topic and offers a number of links and insights. "The first perspective we heard was that folks are sharing via email because it works best. They know and trust the source. The existing social searches are simply too big for trust - the information flow to huge and overwhelming... We trust someone who we know to summarize but to scale it won't work because you loose trust... There is also the issue of wow do we get there when there are people who want to catch our attention for profit not for edification?" These are my observations as well, and these are the sorts of considerations that will drive development in social search. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 10-Year-Old Twins Expelled From U of O
"The university recognized their status, accepted their fees, issued them student cards and allowed them to complete more than half the term before expelling them." One only assumes they were getting good grades, too. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Definition: Massively Multi-Learner Online Learning Environment (MMOLE)
Well of course someone had to describe it and give it a name. Now the education community will act as though whomever gave it the name actually invented it. "MMOLE is a genre of computer generated learning environments in which large numbers of learners interact with each other in a virtual three-dimensional (3D) world with the goal of learning." Derived from MMRPG - Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game. Good enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DSpace: the Next Generation
Some changes are coming in the world of DSpace. Based on the original Open Archives Initiative, DSpace was developed at MIT and open sourced in 2002. After four years, the code needs a trim - "code is mushrooming, preservation needs growing, ad-hoc development is tough." But there are also changes coming to DSpace governance. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Conference
Nice coverage of the ELI conference: Day One, Day Two, . I liked reading the fresh perspective of a Masters Student (her regular blog, Immerse Yourself, was started in September). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Paolo's View of the Future of School
The link is broken right now - it's Java code, so I'm not surprised, it probably couldn't handle the traffic - so I'll link to Christian Long's links to this video conversation between Paolo Friere and Seymour Papert. One for the ages, I would say. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Situating Connectivism
George Siemens has post a presentation (voice and slides in Flash) to prepare for the upcoming online connectivism conference (I am presenting at the conference, one of five events I presenting at online in February). This is part 1, which generally sketches the history. Well, some of the history (my own background is very different, and George's history reads to me like somebody describing a completely different family tree). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School of Thought: Why Aren't E-Textbooks Selling
You can probably guess what my answer would be to the question in the title: something about inflated costs, closed marketplaces, and stupid DRM. According to this article, the answer is "lack of knowledge, poor marketing and few choices." Yeah, right. That's what they said about New Coke. The more interesting bit, though, is an interview with the International Digital Publishing Forum's executive director, Nick Bogaty, who, as the article states, "wants to make file extension .ops to digital books what .mp3 is to music." OPS - the Open Publication Structure (OPS) and its sister format, the Open Packaging Format (OPF), are to textbooks what LOM is to learning objects, more or less. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Second Life
Interesting. Description of a teacher's experimental forays into Second Life. "I was able to talk with other educators and bounce ideas off of them... all of this could be accomplished in an educational centered chat room, but somehow this was different." Great, right? Well, there's this: "I still probably won't make it back into Second Life anytime soon because I don't have the real need right now." And I worry about this, from a CNN article: "It's the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net - this one in 3-D and even more social than the original - with huge opportunities to sell products and services." And more, as noted by PacRimX, "Linden hopes to control the standards for virtual worlds so that they become the equivalent of the HTTP and HTML standards that define the web." We had a standard, remember? VRML. What was wrong with it? Nobody owned it. More...