By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jim Giles: Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head, Nature December 15, 2005

This one is all over the blogosphere but I'll pass it along because it's directly relevant to some previous discussion here. As the article says, "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds." What was most interesting was the number of errors found in Britannica; we assume the peer-reviewed work is a gold standard for knowledge, but this standard is actually fairly loose. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Robert X. Cringely: Google Goes Las Vegas, I, Cringely December 15, 2005

So anyhow, I went out for a beer last night and ran into someone who has a business in electronic display ads. Small world. So we got to talking about Google and adwords and customer demographics and all that, and it became clear that in his view the only thing preventing extensive profiling is legislation (and that this is already well under way elsewhere). He also streams news content into his service, which makes sense, as it gets people to view the ads, but what surprised me was that the news services pay big money for placement into this market. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed: Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, Google December 15, 2005

This is very nice. "Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on." This is basically the same concept as Wikalong, but using blogs instead of wikis. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dan Carnevale: Michigan Considers Requiring High-School Students to Take at Least One Online Course, Chronicle of Higher Education December 14, 2005

According to this article, Michigan wants to make every high school student take an online course. Meanwhile, Ontario wants to make young drivers license applicants prove they are still in high school, to reduce dropouts. Why is our first reaction to make people do things, rather than to make high school, or online courses, good enough to attract students? Why do we insist on standardization? After I dropped out of high school (surprised? you shouldn't be) I picked up my diploma taking part-time and night classes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yaffa Aharoni, Ariel J. Frank and Snunith Shoham: Finding information on the free World Wide Web: A Specialty Meta-search Engine for the Academic Community, First Monday December 14, 2005

I'm not surprised to see the proposal outlined in this paper. For academics, Google searches result in many (sometimes millions) of irrelevant results. And it doesn't search the 'deep web' of archived academic papers. Academic searches, meanwhile, are typically restricted to a particular site, such as, say, CiteSeer or PubMed, and these searches are too narrow. So the authors propose AcadeME, a meta-search engine for academic resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Paul Genoni, Helen Merrick and Michele Willson: The Use of the Internet to Activate Latent Ties in Scholarly Communities, First Monday December 14, 2005

Latent contacts are those people you would contact, but for some reason, have not contacted. A natural example is the connection of podcast researchers in education; as people developed expertise in the subject the would reach out to other people in the same field, if they knew they existed. Eventually these latent contacts do make a connection, usually via blog or email. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lesley Thoms and Mike Thelwall: Academic Home Pages: Reconstruction of the Self, First Monday December 14, 2005

This is a strong and disturbing conclusion: "A typology of homepages and hence identities of academics is proposed based on the Web sites examined, concluding that whether the homepage is constructed by the academic or by the university, the identities of the individual are ultimately lost to the governmentality of the university". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Liz Ditz: Schools, Blogs, Xanga, MySpace...What's it All About, Alfie?, I Speak of Dreams December 14, 2005

I've spent a lot of time browsing around sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, and others, not looking for anything in particular, just trying to get to know cyberspace (in most other jobs, this would be known as 'time wasted surfing the net' - I'm lucky that way). People should do this - there are so many interesting and wonderful people on the net! So I appreciate the work done by Liz Ditz (via Will Richardson and Josie Fraser) to bring to light just what the dangers are of these sites to students. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Martin Jenkins, Tom Browne and Richard Walker: VLE Surveys, UCISA December 14, 2005

Stuart Yeates reports, "A new UCISA report has Moodle and Bodington each with 8% of the installed base, beaten soundly by Blackboard(43), WebCT(37) and in-house developed systems." That's a bit of a gloss on what is a very complex report, packed full of usage statistics. Most interesting to me is the freefall of FirstClass (from 29% to 8% in four years) and the increase of in-house systems (from 11% to 38% in the same time). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Leslie: Why Does 'Freesound' Succeed When so Many Learning Object Repositories fail?, Ed Tech Post December 14, 2005

So we got a foot of snow overnight in Moncton, which of course made it the perfect day to pack myself into the bus and ship myself off to Fredericton, where I'll be at meetings during the day tomorrow (of course I surf during the meetings; how do you thing the newsletter will get published?). Anyhow, the sort of thing I'll be talking about tomorrow is the sort of thing raised here by Scott Leslie as he asks why Freesound - a sound sampling service - is a success where learning objects are less so. It's not interface, it's not metadata - rather, it seems to be a combination of the license (which encourages reuse, natch) and the data format. More...