Norman (Pudds) Downes
This is a very difficult week-end for me as my obviously sick 17 year old cat has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. With some palliative medicine we have been able to restore her to something like normal health, but this will last only for a few days. More...

The Empowered Classroom.... And a Blueprint for the Second Superpower
John Hibbs drafts a reply to James Moore's The Second Superpower Raises Its Beautiful Head, adding the role of education to the mix. As Hibbs notes, "Dr. Moore talks a lot about technology. More...

Draft Declaration of Principles
The World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS), which met last month in Geneva, has release a Draft Statement of Principles defining the structure and the hopes for the coming information age. More...

Ich Bin Ein Illiterati: An Interview with Mihai Nadin
I'm thinking today that it's not so hard to see the future, not so hard to see where we ought to be. Yet another thinker crosses my path today saying pretty much the same thing as is advocated in these pages: that we need to understand how technology is creating a post-literate world, how we need to be able to choose our own futures, how the educational institution needs to be dramatically reformed, how we ought as a society to form the objective of making a basic education abvailable to everyone for free. More...

Three Objections to Learning Objects
This survey paper attempts to identify some of the major causes of discord in the learning object community. There is certainly plenty to choose from, but the author boils it down to three major issues. the first, familiar to anyone with access to a dictionary, is the problem of defining what a 'learning' object is supposed to be; this problem is only compounded by the fact that the definitions offered are almost completely meaningless to the people who are supposed to use them. More...

The Teachers Teach The Techies
An interesting discussion ensues as a forum on learning technologies is launched by CETIS. More...

Hot, Sweaty and Scandalous
There were several stupid patent claims this week - including one on storing and downloading video - but the kicker is this one filed by Bikram Choudhury who wants royalties to be paid by anyone who uses his style of teaching yoga. More...

Study Finds Charter Schools Lack Experienced Teachers
A California study of charter schools in that state finds that the alternative schools lack resources and qualified teachers, raising fears that they may increase, rather than reduce, inequalities. More...

Let's Stop Talking About The '30 Million Word Gap'
Anya Kamenetz, NPR, 2018/06/01
A number of years ago the government ran a series of ads saying, basically, "talk to your baby". But it isn't the number of words that's important, noe indeed is it clear that there was ever a 'gap' in the number of words some babies hear. More...

Drafting #IndieWeb Principles for the Rest of Us
Greg McVerry, IntertextRevolution, 2018/06/01
The author of this post correctly points out that the original indieweb principles were too technical for most people. He thus drafts a second set of indieweb principles that are also too technical for most people. But this page gives us a nice set of starting principles (quoted):

• When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.
• Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone.
• You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you.

The third principle has the potential to be problematic, but I read it this way: you are responsible for your own posts. More...