By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ajax3d Demo
Um, hmm. 3D using Javascript. It works, but is totally not useful in Firefox on Linux (Firefox on Linux has always has rendering issues, and for some reason it doesn't interrupt the right mouse click properly). Still.... very interesting. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Giant Zero Journalism
Doc Searles captures the shifting sands of journalism in this post. "We don't just 'deliver information' like it's a Fedex package. We inform each other. That is, we literally form what other people know. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I'm changed by that. I am not merely in receipt of a box of facts. I am enlarged by knowing more than I did before. Enlarging each other is the deepest calling of journalism, whether it's done by bloggers, anchors or editors." Quite right. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How E-Learning Works
E-Learning as it was understood in 1999, complete with a pseudo-theory about tired neurons. It's not a bad article, as these articles go, and it does represent what is probably the mainstream. But it's interesting to note that the example (the scuba diver simulation) is no way resembles the description (a typical online class) which in turn does not resemble the way the author is actually conveying information (a page-turner type article). We need to ask, why would someone be simulating scuba-diving in the first place, what are the intentions of someone who writes a course, and why do online articles help people learn even when the theory says they shouldn't. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LG Licenses ContentGuard's Patent Portfolio
LG has officially gone over to the dark side as it takes out a license for ContentGuard's digital rights management (DRM) 'technology'. What the move more accurately signals, probably, is a desire for closer relations with the companies that own ContentGuard, including Microsoft, Time Warner and Thomson. This article is eager to argue how smart the deal is for both LG and ContentGuard. While it does indeed signal the end of a very long drough for ContentGuard (which has gone nowhere trying to get royalties from the Open Mobile Alliance, which uses the Open Digital Rights Language), it is rather less so for LG, which now needs to convince others to agree to pay for licensing or else work at a disadvantage. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canadian Schools
Some nice writing describing the work of Darren Kuropatwa and Clarence Fisher - "two Manitoba-based teachers who started as active bloggers with the goal of connecting with educators worldwide. Now they've taken what they know to the classroom, leveraging a raft of tools such as GoogleDocs, Thinkfree, Writely, iRows.com, YouTube, iTunes and other web-based multimedia-type freebies to create new learning environments". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. About E-Journals: Archiving and Preservation
Briefing article on journal article archiving and preservation writtn from a predominately British point of view. As the article notes, "a systematic approach to the issue of ensuring continued access to licensed e-journals has remained elusive." The report looks at the role of institutional and open access repositories and considers current e-journal archiving options. This seems right: "there needs to be a range of options for ensuring long-term preservation and access of the world's scholarly e-journals". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID: a Step Forward for E-Learning Standards
Another call to pay attention to OpenID, this time explicitly as an education standard. "It is time for e-learning developers to cast their vote for OpenID by employing it actively in the products and services that they are developing". 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. What Lies Beneath?
A link to a Web 2.0 report led Beth Kanter to post on the concept of 'collabuary' raised in the report, which prompted me to comment in reply, trying to distinguish between folksonomies and collabuaries (which I think isn't a useful term; it just means 'vocabulary' or 'taxonomy'). This in turn led Kanter to send an email in reply, the gist of which is captured in this post, describing a filtering network for non-profits that is partially collaboration, but partially individual action. So where does the line between group and network apply here? Good question - it contains elements of both. I guess I would say, as a rule of thumb, that you pass from 'network' (autonomous action, folksonomy) to 'group' (collaborative action, vocabulary or taxonomy) when somebody says, "You're doing that wrong". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Mothership Now Supports OpenID
The 'Mothership' in this case being WordPress. Jason Gorman writes, "I guess what this represents to me is an opportunity to adopt cool technologies as they emerge, instead of having to wait for Blackboard to build them into their existing applications". More...
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