By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Abandoning Plaxo
"I'm abandoning Plaxo, have canceled my Premium trial subscription, and am not interested in trying your service again." Well that's pretty final. I never trusted Plaxo in the first place - a certain amount of spam will do that - but it would have still been nice if it had worked. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Is It No Longer An Implementation Error?
I've had my criticisms of PISA in the past. But it's hard to top this: "The New York Times reports that errors in the testing booklet of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has caused the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to invalidate all of the American test results." Chris Lehmann asks, "What of the kids who took that test and halfway through it, realized that the test was wrong but couldn't do anything about it? What of the kids who, a few years ago, took the NY State Physics Regents and then had to sweat out their high school graduation after they bombed it, waiting until the state admitted that they screwed up the test?" More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can You Say Convergence?
Jeff Whipple writes, "The new Livescribe paper-based computing platform is due out at early in the next year. Complete with a 'smartpen', e-paper, applications, etc, this system will allow users to write, much like on traditional paper. The difference is that content is digitally translated, stored and is sharable via email or other tools like blogs." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers - Teacher As Learner
Good post, relevant to the talk I'm doing online for SMOOT (Finland) tomorrow. "The decision to "learn with the students," to use one's own personal blog in the class blogosphere, to engage as a participant and a co-learner, often leads us to think that we will lose the respect of our students and that we will no longer really teach... [but] losing the teacherly voice is not the equivalent of losing the voice of an expert." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re-Writing for Proseminar
I like student writing, and especially David Wiley's students. Rob Barton asks, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to sue, what is its legal standing?" Kristy Bloxham breathlessly states "Connexions isn't just about creating a collection of bite-sized informational chunks. It's also about fostering a quantum leap in the evolution of literacy - something akin to the development of the first written language or the creation of the printing press" (I don't think the breathless part is bad, I would just rather see it applied to the wider field of e-learning, rather than to a specific product like Connexions). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School Textbooks Rife with Errors, Tentatively Approved
Remember how people were questioning whether Wikipedia is accurate enough for students to use? "Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase - 109,263. That's the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008." Oy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PLEs and the Institution
The core of this post is in the diagram (which is Scott Wilson's), which takes a very institution-centric view of the personal-learning environment. My own feeling is that as PLEs become mainstream institutions can reassess whether a course-centric mode of delivery is the most appropriate. More...