By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeff Jarvis[Edit][Delete]: Toy Company Breaks Little Girls' Hearts, BuzzMachine [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Why am I so dogmatic about open and distributed online communities? Stories like this offer the answer. Jeff Jarvis writes, "Mattel is shutting down its American Girl Club and our daughter is rightfully upset." As he points out, "Because of the anonymity features of the community, this means that thousands of friendships are suddenly cut off." Rex Hammock is more blunt. "The issue here is one of 'identity.' Who owns 'me' online? I think I own my identity, but the weasles at Mattel obviously think they own the identities (even if they are 'anonymous' avatars of real girls) of the American Girl Club members." I think Mattel really should reconsider this one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen J.H. Yang[Edit][Delete]: Context Aware Ubiquitous Learning Environments for Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Learning, Educational Technology and Society [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Wide ranging paper describing a context sensitive peer to peer learning environment, including a "personalized annotation management system, and multimedia real-time group discussion system" and a "context acquisition mechanism for collecting contextual information at run time." This approach underlies a lot of the through currently being expressed in personal learning environments and demonstrates some of the concepts in tangible form. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Warlick[Edit][Delete]: Announcing hitchhikr.com, 2 cents Worth [Edit][Delete]2 Cents Worth [Edit][Delete] June 20, 2006
Dave Warlick has hopped on to the Glu meme, in this case pulling together information from various sources about web conferences. It takes the conference aggregator I created for Merlot in 2003 (and NMC in 2004) one step further, bringing together Flickr images and adding a list of conferences in the right hand column. A good idea, but I have always wanted there to be some sort of conference RSS referencing system that organizers could use to really pull this together, using specific pointers in the XML rather than tags or keywords. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wesley Fryer[Edit][Delete]: Imbee Supports Safe Digital Networking for Kids!, Moving at the Speed of Creativity [Edit][Delete] June 19, 2006
Some people have taken an interest in some posts on my other blog, including one on adults and learning and another on whether teaching is dead. Like most of the posts on my Half an Hour blog, they are intended less as public writings and more as exercises in which I work out my thoughts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: The Students Own Education, Open University [Edit][Delete] June 19, 2006
Video from my talk at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, is now available; this is the link (I'll provide an audio MP3 file as soon as I can). You can view the slides right on the video, which uses a nifty two-screen display, or you can download the slides and follow along that way. Or, if you don't want to listen to two hours of audio and video, you can read Tony Hirst's excellent summary notes. From the abstract: "Just as students are finding alternative sources of content and community, students are also in the process of defining their own learning environment, one that transcends institutional boundaries. The concept of the personal learning environment, already in discussion and development, will not merely transform learning, it will tranfer ownership of that learning." [Tags: ] [Comment]. More...