By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rob Wall[Edit][Delete]: New Edublog - The Illuminated Dragon - and Some Good Questions, StigmergicWeb [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

Rob Wall introduces us to this new edublog by Donna DesRoches. A sample: "Shouldn't teachers play with new knowledge and information? Why should learning be serious work? Is this the feeling we impart to our students about learning? If teachers cannot find joy in learning is it possible to create students who are life-long learners?" These questions alone could fill a blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christian Long[Edit][Delete]: 10 Brain Things...and One Reminder that People are the Curriculum!, think:lab [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

[link: 4 Hits] Eleven posts - some of which have been seen before in these pages - juxtaposed under the heading of 'brain things'. An interesting gestalt. "See the 'box' even though there are only a few line segments. Your eye does the rest. The Greeks offered constellations, night star 'stories'. And patterns are truths (again, my opinon) much as the "medium is the message" (thank you, Marshall)." No, patterns are not truth - patterns are perception, how we see the world. I am a specialist in pattern recognition, and I am aware more than most (perhaps) that when our mind leaps into some sort of recognition of what it 'sees' there remains considerable room for error. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeremy Price[Edit][Delete]: Technology As Trickster, Smelly Knowledge [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

I'm pretty firmly in what is described here as the 'Canadian camp': "technology brings with it powerful but subtle biases.... If technology is not a tool to be chosen for use, then, what is it?... Perhaps one suggestion might be an ecological or environmental metaphor (as in, for example, the common phrase online environments). Perhaps technology is like the water we drink and the air we breathe. Water and air are not tools. We cannot choose to breathe the air or drink the water.... Technology is not a tool which we can choose to use or not; whether wisely or not. Technology exists. Such an ecological/environmental metaphor allows us to examine different approaches to its use and its potential impact." So what of the 'American' idea of technology and progress. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. roseg[Edit][Delete]: Zero Sum Laude, Random Selections [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006
A rare Saturday issue of OLDaily, partially because I'm behind in my coverage and partially because I need something to do. I am home again from Sweden and will be home for twelve days (I checked) before heading for Alaska. I'm still a little jet lagged (it will catch up with me tomorrow), pensive, reflective and conflicted. That's OK, that's my usual state of being (including, these days, the jet lag). Which brings me to this post, which describes what amounts to an advertsing campaign by a certain soft drink company that not only apropriates our medium for its own ends, but also even the number zero. I won't point to that site (you can get it from the link) but I will point to the alternative, one that is more reflective of my values and indeed even my mood: "Drinks don't need cheesy theme songs, a posse of trucks, or plastic/aluminium containers. But thanks to companies like Coke, land is cleared and waste and pollution are created just to make sure people have sweetened, chilled beverages. All this in a world where one person in five has ZERO access to clean drinking water." So let me put this in perspective and put it a bit bluntly: when Coca-Cola puts as much money into providing drinking water to people who have none as it does into its advertising, then I will be interested in what it has to say to me and may even buy some of its products. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unknown[Edit][Delete]: How Do Developers Use HTML?, Google [Edit][Delete] January 27, 2006
Absolutely fascinating analysis of how HTML markup us used by developers, based on a Google study of roughly a billion web pages. Authors of metadata standards should look at these results (though they certainly should have observed these trends long before now, and yet, for some reason, don't take them into account). Perhaps the most telling - and characteristic - remark in the Google study comes in the discussion of the use of the body element: "One conclusion one can draw from the spread of attributes used on the body element is that authors don't care about what the specifications say. Of these top twenty attributes, nine are completely invalid, and five have been deprecated for nearly eight years, half the lifetime of the Web so far." Now we have to ask, when people don't care what the HTML standard says, why would they care what your standard says. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unknown[Edit][Delete]: Disney Launches Online Theme Park, Stuff [Edit][Delete] January 27, 2006

I have long warned about what e-learning would look like when Disney got into the picture. That day has come. "Walt Disney has launched an online subscription service aimed at preschool children, completing its plan for what a Disney executive called 'an online theme park'. The advertising-free [except for the ubiquitous branding - SD], Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online costs $US49.95 a year and is the most learning-oriented of Disney's internet subscription services for kids". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Guides to Metadata, CETIS [Edit][Delete]Cetis [Edit][Delete] January 27, 2006

If you find yourself mystified by the offhand references in this newsletter to metadata, LOM, Dublin Core, and other specifications, then this CETIS list of guides to metadata is a good place to get started. It begins with some links on metadata in general (what is metadata? why is it used?) and proceeds through some of the major types. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ulises Ali Mejias[Edit][Delete]: Is Morality an Emergent Behavior?, Ideant [Edit][Delete] January 27, 2006

I didn't mean for this week's newsletters to have morality as a theme, but a post today from Ulises points back to this link, making it three days in a row for me to touch on the topic. Perhaps that's just as well. In this item, he advances the proposition that morality is not based on reason (in fact, reason actually impedes it), but rather, "morality is actually an emergent behavior - in other words, a behavior exhibited by organisms acting according to very simple rules requiring little reasoning." If this is the case (and I believe something like it is) then it would seem to me that we sense, rather than infer, the morality (or immorality) of our actions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is E-Learning 2.0 For Real?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kate DuBose Tomassi[Edit][Delete]: Stanford On ITunes Is For Everybody, Forbes [Edit][Delete] January 26, 2006

The author states that it is "an unprecedented move" as Stanford moves with Apple to podcast "a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes." I am at a bit of a loss to figure out what's unprecedented. Podscasting lectures? No, I've been doing that for two years, and I am by no means alone. Allowing free public access to university course content? No, MIT has that pretty much sewn up with OpenCourseWare. More...