By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Comments on REL patents, Third-Party Standards, and MPEG LA
A fascinating email sent by Steve Rowat to the ODRL-interest mailing list. Rowat first notes that he left the patent business because "I no longer felt morally justified in being part of an industry that routinely stole from, blocked, or in other ways interfered with inventors who legitimately owned their own creation." I have often expressed this view of the patent industry, but it is unusual to see an insider express it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-learning for Target Learner Groups – Youth
It has a publication date of March 31 but it showed up in the EdNA RSS feed on Wednesday. This report surveys major topics in learning for youth - the 'digital native', games, mobile learning, blogs. Some good content pointing clearly to the defects of traditional classroom instruction. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning in an Online World
This report is unreadable online - a tiny type combined with double leading and two-column format in PDF makes it impossible. People purporting to tell us how to use ICT in learning and pedagogy should know better - unless theyt don't know better. Anyhow, after wrestling with it for an hour or so (instead of the ten minutes it should have taken) I found a document containing sweeping (and not always correct) generalizations and relatively few particulars. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Globally Collaborative Experiential Learning
This article is the highlight from the July edition of the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education. It describes the use of global grid simulations as an experiental teaching tool and in particular the Global University System (GUS). Some more detail would have been nice, but it's a good overview. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Where Can I Find Good Tech Articles
I have run a few posts critical of various authors and editors recently (including in this issue). I want to be clear that people shouldn't feel singled out when I do this - the articles selected are merely representative of a type of criticism I want to make, and not an indication that I think so-and-so is doing a bad job. Hey, sure, maybe I'm in no position to criticize. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beyond the Horseless Carriage: Harnessing the potential of ICT in education and training
Written in April and released some time later (the first blog cite is from elearnopedia June 30, which I missed, and then just today in elearnspace - they should add RSS to this page), this paper, written by the CEO of education.au, is more important for the direction it signals than what it says. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Mean Ye Collaboration Tools?
Alan Levine and I will be joining Philip Long at the EDUCAUSE Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC) in a couple of weeks. We are jointly presenting a seminar on collaboration technologies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Persistent Identity (or not)
Nils Peterson looks at the question of persistent identity - picking up from my commentary on Catherine Howell's reply to Andrew Middleton. He asks, "how do I know that 'fratboy' on aol and 'cougar21' at Washington State University are the same individual?" Well, fair enough - and one would think that if 'fratboy' said "I am Nils Peterson" and 'cougar21' said "I am Nils Peterson" that this should be good enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students Say High Schools Let Them Down
Well I may as well link to the new York Times article; everyone else has. I like Jeremy Hiebert's take: "What interests me about these kinds of articles is the lack of vision for what might work better -- usually the only idea is to raise standards and test more aggressively". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Introducing IMS ePortfolio
Two parts (Part one, Part two) of a description of the IMS e-portfolio specification (a third part ios forthcoming), clearly written and offering a depth of understanding. And while I appreciate the explanation of how IMS creates specifications, I still think this is the wrong way to do it: "the whole process, from charter to final specification, can take place with (a) No actual implementations to test whether the spec works and (b) No initial submissions of existing implementations to start things off". More...