By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vidipedia
Another find by Bee on TALO. Vidipedia is "the free video encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I'm not so sure about this one. As of this posting, the most popular videos include Hiccup Girl, who has had the hiccups for three weeks, the Gaussian Gun, supposedly a perpetual motion machine, and a JFK Assassination video. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. US Copyright Lobby Out-of-Touch
In the latest report from a U.S. intellectual property lobby group, Michael geist notes, " what is most noteworthy about the IIPA effort is that dozens of countries - indeed most of the major global economies in the developed and developing world - are singled out for criticism." One wonders, he writes, who it is that is really out of step here. "Countries singled out for criticism should not be deceived into thinking that their laws are failing to meet an international standard, no matter what US lobby groups say". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box
Useful article that offers another approach to multi-column CSS layout. The problem faced by this designer was to create columns of equal height, and the solution was to use negative margin values. I use negative margin values myself, mostly for images and call-outs, and while I am still not completely comfortable with it, they seem stable enough to me. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could Yahoo Pipes Make Repository Interoperability Obsolete?
So far as I am concerned, repository interoperability has always been obsolete, since the potential for Yahoo Pipes (and Edu_RSS, I might add, which does the same thing) has been apparent since the beginning of RSS. Note as well Scotte Leslie's comment, pointing to other applications that perform siliar functions. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Julie Amero Tragedy
I have covered the Julie Amero travesty earlier. Nancy Willard's report is required reading. "In a nutshell, it is quite evident in the case of Julie Amero, that the district's technical security was woefully and sorely lacking, Amero had not been provided with appropriate instructions on use of the computer and actions to take if inappropriate materials appear on the screen and was doing exactly what she had been told to do, and the investigation was not only inadequate – it was thoroughly and unconscionably mishandled." I think that whomever has the authority should intervene in this case immediately. And I think that we should ask ourselves how a free society could allow something like this to take place in the first place. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google to Sell Online Software Suite
As the story says, "Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader's invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM." The real weakness of these applications is that, because they are online, they can run slowly. That's not a problem on a corporate intranet, and in addition, they become much easier to maintain. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peers, Desist!
There has been a bit of an uptick in interest in the concept of automated online peer assistance. David Truss, for example, writes on my Explode! comment wall that he'd like to see something like this FieldFindr made a reality. And Will Richardson covers similar ground summarizing a Henry Jenkins article: "we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network." Well once such application might be Peer Assist, shown here at the University of Ottawa. But not all is happiness and joy. Dave Snowden complains, "It seems that such natural processes are no longer good enough. Now we have to formalise the process, bring in facilitators, stick to strict time limits and get rid of critical comments, only allowing positive thought". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Living the Web 2.0
I like ths account of how Web 2.0 has entered into her personal life, but what I really like are the 'click', 'learn' and 'share' icons. See the on this post as well (sorry about mashing the accents on the author's name - I have to confess, the handling of special characters continues to elude me; I've tried making everything UTF-8 and yet they still get gibbled when I try to put them in my posts). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Concept Maps
Well this has to be useful, right? I'm not sure exactly how, but still... "I spend the last week manually entering and partially organizing all the concepts in the California state science curriculum. There were at least 2,000 concepts, so it was a pretty lengthy task... Please note that the concept system has not been fully integrated into the rest of the edu 2.0 system; it's a work in progress". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Celebrate Diversity!
Link to a pretty good graphic on diversity. I'm less impressed with the commentary - the point isn't to 'celebrate diversity' as though it were all folk music and funny dances. The idea is that diverse groups solve problems more effectively because diverse groups take more variables into account and factor out variables. More...
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