By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lowell Monke: Charlotte's Webpage: Why Children Shouldn't Have the World at Their Fingertips, Orion October 11, 2005

I guess people make a living publishing articles like this, which doesn't seem really fair to me. The gist of the article is that computers harm education, mostly because they deaden childrens' encounters with the real world. The author cites what seems to be example after example - the (uncited) Fuchs and Woessman report, the cancellation of recess, the glee with which students set about hacking the school network. The idea is that children are being shown a false reality. For example, "If computers discourage a sense of belonging and the hard work needed to interact responsibly with others, they replace it with a promise of power." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Jaschik: Too Much Information?, Inside Higher Ed October 11, 2005

The author highlights two professors who were denied tenure at Chicago, and while careful not to link their blogs and their denial, writes a story about it. "Asked if their blogs hurt their tenure bids, Carroll and Drezner answer in nearly identical ways: They are certain that their tenure chances weren't improved by having a blog, and while their chances might have been hurt, they don't have any certainty about that." Which to me points to the real problem - the secrecy in which such decisions are made. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Doug Lederman: Easing the Copyright Challenge, Inside Higher Ed October 11, 2005

According to this story, "the Copyright Clearance Center is... integrating the copyright permission process directly into the software colleges use to build and manage online courses," specifically, Blackboard. Written like a press release, this story offers no analysis at all. At the very least, the author could have observed that copyright restrictions are being used not only to prevent file sharing, but to foster and entrench software lock-in. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kaufmann-Wills group: The Facts About Open Access, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers October 11, 2005

This is a pretty good report and appears to make a genuine effort to be even-handed and fair. It is based on a study of and comparison between hundreds of open access and commercial journals. It becomes apparent that the open access movement is young, rough around the edges, not as polished or rigorous as the commercial sector, and not as profitable. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: MERLOT Grapevine, MERLOT October 11, 2005

MERLOT's Fall Issue of Grapevine is out. The main item concerns a new relationship between O'Reilly books and MERLOT - wonder whether the next Perl camel book is going to be peer reviewed... yeah, thought not. People who write software will recognize Safari not as a (dysfunctional) Apple browser but as a long-standing online books program run by O'Reilly (it has been, what, three years now?). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John Hagel: Mary's Back - The Internet, China and Bubbles, Edge Perspectives with John Hagel October 10, 2005

Summary of a talk by Morgan-Stanley's Mary Meeker at the recent web 2.0 conference. The question on everyone's mind, it seems, is whether we are in another bubble. And while the tenor seems to be that we are not, there are still trends worth watching. Mobile computing in China, for example. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gina Trapani: Google Reader Spotlight: Publish Posts to your Blog, LifeHacker October 10, 2005

Google launched an RSS feed reader last week to wide - and generally negative - publicity in the blogging community. Not because people questioned whether the world needed another feed reader, much less one by Google (though there was that undercurrent), but more because people found the interface less user-friendly than most of Google's previous work. Some writers reported having trouble uploading their OPML (a format that lists their subscriptions) from Bloglines; mine mostly uploaded, but it wasn't problem-free. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! October 10, 2005

Yahoo! launched a new podcast search and subscribe service on Sunday, marking the most significant development in the field since ipodder (now known as indiepodder). Yahoo! does podcasting a bit differently - "When you subscribe... you will be asked to download a small file called a .pcast file that contains information about the podcast. This file tells jukebox software like Yahoo! Music Engine, iTunes 5.0, and others to keep tabs on this podcast and to go fetch new episodes for you whenever they are ready." The .pcast file looks almost exactly like an RSS file. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations October 10, 2005

Mathemagenic pointed to this conference website featuring dozens of interesting papers - well, more accurately, abstracts, as I didn't find a single full paper despite searching through dozens. The papers look interesting, though I'm not sure how many would be worth reading in detail. The abstracts themselves constitute almsot the full fifteen minutes delegates were likely allocated. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference, Open Education Conference October 10, 2005

The Open Education Conference proceedings are now available as a 181 page PDF document - the last 8 pages are blank, but that's small consolation as it's still something you have to print out rather than struggle through online. There's a lot of good content here and the usual players in open educational content - Wikipedia, Connexions, eduCommons, Merlot, Public Library of Science, OOPS and many more - are all represented with project updates. More...