By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lisa Galarneau: Could I Have Your Attention Please?, Relevancy November 28, 2005

Lisa Galarneau is right to point to this presentation by Tantek Çelik (the same person behind microformats.org) about Attention.xml. This is a clear example of what I have been calling 'second party metadata' - the idea here is that the use of a resource is as important, if not more important, as the nature of the resource. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Cormier: What is this Whole School Thing About Anyway?, Dave’s Educational Blog November 28, 2005

Two strands of thought come together in my mind, and this strand - the question of whether we need education-specific environments (such as the PLE) is one of them. The other is the ongoing discussion circulating around the education blogosphere about schools blocking weblogs and other websites (see here, for example). Both revolve around the same idea: in learning, we want access to the internet, but not necessarily all of it - there's a lot out there that would aid learning, but a lot that, frankly, gets in the way. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine: Everything Steve Johnson Writes About is Bad For You, Cogdogblog September 8, 2005

Alan Levine reviews Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and gives it four paws up. He writes, "Johnson's view on pop culture is so fresh, new, and insightful, it is invigorating. So maybe if you don't buy that 'pop culture is actually making us smarter' this book should give some deeper thought before just dismissing pop culture as a wasteland". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson: Wouldn't it Be Nice If..., Scott's Workblog September 7, 2005

A one-liner from Scott Wilson that concludes "... conference wireless access didn't routinely block chat? I'm at ALT-C and suffering AIM withdrawal" (That's the entire post so you don't need to click on the link). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Right Ways and Wrong Ways of Podcasting in Education
Short article with supporting podcast (or is it short podcast with supporting article?) on the right way and the wrong way to do podcasting in education. The keeper: (Don't) "require students to listen to the podcast while staying tied to a computer." Ack, I can't even imagine the horror. And Reynolds emphasizes: "I'm not a believer in 60-minute speeches...". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If You Don't Build It, They'll Build Their Own...
Brian Lamb - who manages wiki support at UBC - runs across a bunch of UBC students pondering their own wiki in a conversation at LiveJournal. He offers the official services, but is told, "using a UBC-hosted wiki requires us to comply with a certain set of standards and forces us to give UBC the final say in content... a wiki should be democratic, and any university-owned pages and servers aren't". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Contexts, Boundaries, Asymmetry
Scott Wilson clarifies his recent remarks. "In the special case of a teacher-initiated conversation (the topic of my post), there is a need to create an initial agreement based on the topic and the participants; unlike the kind of conversation we're having, a course usually starts with the students having no knowledge of who else is taking it". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Wants to Own Content?
This article starts from the premise that the content-hoarders have lost and that "the army of all of us, the ones who weren’t in charge, the ones without the arms — won." What does that mean? "The value is no longer in owning content or distribution. The value is in relationships". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Text vs. Text vs. Text
Fascinating look at new entrants into the "lucrative textbook market for Econ 101." The author tosses some big numbers around, then profiles two new economics authors, one (apparently) from each branch of the political spectrum. Note: "Some professors predict that public relations, not content, will determine the success of the two new texts". More...