Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism
One of the founders of Wikipedia expresses concerns about the online encyclopedia's future. Wikipedia needs to appear more credible, he argues, and to do this it needs a mechanism where expertise prevails. More...

Flickr, The Land of 10,000 Memes
What makes the internet great, in my mind, isn't so much the services you can access online, isn't so much online news or even education. It's the stuff around the edges, the odd and sometimes magical forms of self-expression, that the internet enables. The more popular of these end up as internet memes, and through them you see glimpses into humanity no media has ever been able to capture. More...

eBay Stops Accepting Microsoft Passports
Discussion and analysis of Microsoft's retreat from Passport, covered here yesterday. The author suggests that a major beneficiary will be the Liberty Alliance, a consortium of 150 companies providing federated identity management. Maybe. More...

A Smaller World
With the dawn of 2005 I begin my tenth year publishing Stephen's Web and the fifth year I have been mailing copies of OLDaily to the world. In that time I've lived in three cities and travelled across Canada and around the world. It has been, for me, a decade of tremendous growth, and for all of us, I think, a decade in which the world grew smaller, more interconnected, more cohesive. More...

Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize
The part of popular culture that most resembles education is the documentary. And the cost of making documentaries has been rising dramatically because of increased licensing costs. More...

Pupils to Get Anti-piracy Lessons
One wonders what sort of lessons will be taught to British students in the context of this program to teach them "on music piracy and copyright issues." Will they be shown Courtney Love's article showing how an artist who releases a gold record ends up in debt. More...

E-Learning and Economic Development
The authors argue "it is possible to develop and organize e-Learning courses with modest technology and in environment with different levels of economic development" and base this conclusion in their experiences using the technology to deliver learning in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the aftermath of the Bosnian war. More...

Using Weblogs in ESL/EFL Classes
Discussion group set up on Yahoo! to support an online class in weblogging in in English language teaching. More...

e-learning Content
"Traditional copyright licences are far too restrictive to develop an ecology of e-learning content." Thus writes Graham Atwell in a position paper to the eLearning Consultation Workshops, one of many that can be found on the Workshop website. A summary of the workshop is also available, and while the discussion includes Creative Commons, it also asserts that "appropriate business models for the publishers are essential." To this I am inclined to respond in the same manner as Cory Doctorow: "If you believe that 'content owners still call most of the shots' then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous." It's not up to education to accomodate publishers - it's up to publishers to adapt. More...

eBay Retires MS Passport Sign-In
We may be seeing the end of Microsoft's Passport, as a commentator on Slashdot notices that Amazon has ended its relation with the program and that the Passport partners list has been taken down. More...