By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Disintegrated Thoughts On Content Integration and Remix
Brian Lamb, who will be keynoting at this year's this year's Open Education Conference in Utah, ponders the back and forth of whether web deveopers will ever agree on standards. There's the depressing news from the commercial side, as we hear that Blackboard will never support anything like a proper export function, and depressing news from the open source side, as developers hesitate to support proprietary sites like Flickr and YouTube. "I'm dismayed by this stance," he writes, wondering what the online learning video awards would have looked like had clips from YouTube been banned. Well maybe - but let's wait a few years and see how it feels when it transpires that nobody will ever be able to access the actual videos except Google. More...
DSpace ArchReview
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DSpace ArchReview
The DSpace review is out and probably most deserves props for process. Not only is the report available online in three formats (.doc, .pdf and .ppt) the entire process was captured in a wiki displaying the process and issues, community review group membership, surveys, pre-readings, brainstorming, and five full days of discussion notes. Though I have been critical of customer-driven design in the past (which results in bloatware), this process makes me think it can work. Maybe. Anyhow, the outcome of the review is to call for basic improvements, such as making the software more modular and enabling it to scale to 100 downloading users at a time (made me think of my own problems, heh). More...