By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Virtual Worlds Shake-Up
Stan Trevena points to and comments on a BBC article describing some overdue changes coming to the MMORPG world (for the rest of you - that's what online 3D looked like before Second Life grabbed all the media coverage). "Lord of the Rings Online is about ready to launch. It is very similar to World of Warcraft and has the potential to bleed off players from WOW." No kidding. A 3D world with something to do in it - what will they think of next? While we're at it, Emma Duke-Williams posts a list of 3D worlds. "We just seem to have drifted into SL exclusively." yeah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vixy
I signed up for the Second Life Educators mailing list and it paid off in one day, as Gunnar Schwede posts this link. "This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (Youtube's movie,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online." Even better, When you submit an url, it will download and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Does Mobile Technology Equate with Mobile Learning?
Leonard Low clarifies his thoughts on the definition of 'mobile learning', concentrating more on social factors (ubiquity, ease of use, appropriateness of use in public places, cost) rather than on the device itself. On the one hand, I can see the point - but on the other hand, the definition seems very arbitrary. None of these conditions have anything to do with being mobile (indeed, the definition explicitly excludes mobility as a consideration). And it just happens to favour closed, proprietary platforms that access restricted networks over open or open source platforms that communicate via open protocols on a peer-to-peer or networked basis. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Best Animated Gif Ever Created, I Reckon
Before we had Flash video, we had animated gifs. Which reminds us again that a video is nothing more than a series of still images (one shown every 24th or 32nd of a second). This animated gif is, as Kottke says, a tour de force. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Frontier of Education: Web 3D
This is the best post of 2007 to date. My feeling is that the Web 3D described by Vicki Davis here is a lot more likely to have legs than the weakly insipid Web 3.0 touted by the backers of the corporate semantic web. "The 3D web has really been around since the Sims went online and allowed people to virtually live next to each other. However, things like Second Life, Xbox live, Google Earth and World of Warcraft, are just beginning to show the power of networks and engagement of the 3D web. Now things like Moove and Kaneva are cropping up. The MetaVerse roadmap first met last year to discuss the 'pathway to the 3D web.'"
And more, "I think the next big browser will allow you to interact in 3D with any website. (Yes, Second Life is open source, but the environment is not!) Why should you have to 'join?' Shouldn't there be protocols and filters and standards for a 3D web browsing experience just like we have with a 2D experience of words and static photographs?" Quite right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Campus Downloading Crackdown
The RIAA is attempting to convert universities into its own private enforcement arm (a lot the way librarians act as muscle for publishers). "We take this opportunity to once again ask schools to be proactive to step up and accept responsibility for the activities of students on their networks. It's not a legal responsibility, but a moral responsibility, as educators, as leaders transmitting values to their students." I think that the music industry has a lot of gall talking about morality. Here is the RIAA letter to university presidents. And here is the response sent back by David Ward, president of the American Council on Education (ACE)". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LETSI - The Proposed New International Steward for SCORM
There's a meeting coming up shortly in London for LETSI - that's 'Learning, Education&Training Systems Interoperability'. This is the body that is supposed to replace ADL as the custodians of SCORM, and to bring peace and harmony to the world of e-learning standards besides. According to the prospectus, membership is proposed to be limited to institutions who pay, say, $10K a pop. So you won't be seeing me there. What I wonder is why ADl couldn't vest the stewardship of SCORM with an existing organization. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. And Now, the Animated E-Framework
Animation of the e-Framework (a set of coordinated tools to support e-learning). After clicking through a bunch of links (including a link-loop for the unwary) you get a 23 megabyte Quicktime that won't play on Linux. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Debating the "Brain Glitch" Theory
The interminable phonics debate (how did this get so politicized?) continues in ASCD's Educational leadership and carries over into this item in the ASCD Blog. The debate begins with neurologist Judy Willis criticizing claims that "neuroscience proves the necessity of intensive phonics instruction for students who struggle with reading." In particular, she points to the limits of neuroimaging technologies. And she questions whether the children being studied were actually rerading of whether they were merely reciting. The response suggests that Willis ognores decades of research showing that "to read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech." I'm more inclined to the view that learning to read is complex, including both elements of phonics and language structure or syntax. More...