By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens: Michael Feldstein and Blackboard, Elearnspace ELearnSpace August 17, 2006
Alfred Essa raises concerns that IMS might have now that one of its partners has played the patent card. The next IMS meeting, to be hosted by Blackboard in September, should be a pretty interesting session. Essa wonders what a question and answer with Blackboard would look like.
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) send an email advising "the patents are afforded no 'presumption of validity'" and that, as Michael Feldstein summarizes, "there is no patent in Europe yet, it will take a long time for there to be a patent in Europe, and in the event that there is a patent in Europe, the EUÃf¢x^TMs patent law is much friendlier to challenging patents than current U.S. law."
Michael Feldstein also explains why Desire2Learn CEO John Baker is our hero, explaining that "Desire2Learn is doing an enormous public service." Of course, others have observed, D2L may have no choice - once you cave on something like this, you can count on the gravy train leading to your doorstep. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed: MobiFilm Academy, Nokia August 17, 2006

Although the focus of this set of lessons is film-making using a mobile device, it nonetheless offers some excellent advice for video recoding in general. How to frame your shot, how to pan and zoom, and much more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. StevenB: Google Jockeys For Conference Sessions, ACRLog August 17, 2006
Someone at the Masie Center must be reading blogs, as this items tells us that the next masie conference will use Google jockeys, people who search Google for resources (displayed on a large screen) while a presenter talks. The conference will also have someone developing mindmaps during presentations, a la e-learning forum. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christian Long: Toymakers and Textbook Publishers In a Race to Keep Up with Those Pesky Astronomers, think:lab August 17, 2006
Within a few seconds of the IAU vote, Wikipedia will be up to date, recording the fact that we have 12 planets in the solar system. Newspapers and television will record the information some hours later, some course materials by this september, textbooks in a year or two. Encyclopedia Britannica? Maybe never. As for me, well, while I celebrate the addition of Ceres and Xena to the solar system, I question why Charon ought not be counted as a moon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mark Gerencser, Fernando Napolitano, and Reginald Van Lee: The Megacommunity Manifesto, Booz Allen Hamilton August 17, 2006
How do we solve the hard problems facing our communities? Poverty, for example, or environment, or employment? With a provincial election to be called Friday evening, this question is especially relevant here. Some say such matters are best left to the private sector; others place the responsibility on government. This paper argues that "the conventional managerial decision-making style - in which a boss exercises decision rights or delegates them to subordinates - is no longer adequate. Solutions require multi-organizational systems that are larger and more oriented to multilateral action than conventional cross-sector approaches are... a megacommunity is not strictly a business niche. Nor is it a public-private partnership, which is typically an alliance focused on a relatively narrow purpose. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Louis Schmier[Edit][Delete]: Creating A Motivational Classroom, Random Thoughts [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
Sometimes I wonder whether I'm right in my approach, philosophy and priorities when it comes to learning, and then out of the blue comes a well-respected source that confirms and crystalizes my thoughts on the issue. Hence, from Louis Schmier:
"Too many academics, ignoring the conclusions of Carl Rogers and Edward Deci and Teresa Amabile, if we know who they are and are familiar with their work, think we can "do" something to a student. That is, we can motivate or we can teach. And, too many of us believe we can do it by the pressure of enticement or threat, and control. We crack down, impose stringent discipline, lure and entice with bonuses, make students buckle down, threaten, and force students to behave through reward and punish with grades. Extra credit here, a point taken off a grade there. It doesn't work. We know it doesn't work...." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mark Ahlness[Edit][Delete]: Arbor Heights - a Dozen Years on the Web!, WWWEDU [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
By looking in the right place, you sometimes find the right thing. The right place, in this instance, is this post by Mark Ahlness on WWWDEV. The right thing was found when I decided it was worth listing here in OLDaily, and is found below.
Ahlness writes (I have embedded links into the text), "Today is an important anniversary. Twelve years ago today, August 14, 1994, the Arbor Heights Elementary School web site appeared on the Internet. Below are a dozen items to remember and celebrate:
1) Our first page looked like this.
2) Ours was the 9th elementary school with a web site. It is the only one of those schools still at the same URL: - or these days, just head to www.arborheights.com
3) Take a virtual tour of the evolution of our home page
4) The Arbor Heights Elementary School web site was featured via screenshot in Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead".
5) The site hosts the complete archive of The Random Thoughts of Louis Schmier, a collection of the writings of one of the Internet's visionary educational philosophers for more than a decade.
6) The Arbor Heights web site originated, was the host for several years for, and is still the physical coordinating center for, the largest educational activity coordinated on the Internet, The Earth Day Groceries Project.
Not resting on its laurels, the school is pushing out into the world of web 2.0 with the last six:
7) a PTSA blog.
8) six rss feeds on its home page
9) a PTSA listserv>
10) a school wiki, just starting out
11) podcasts of and pdf versions of the Jr. Seahawk Newsletter, "The oldest continuously published elementary school student newspaper on the Internet" here and here
12) home of http://roomtwelve.com - a classroom of third graders helping to redefine 21st century literacy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sonia Arrison[Edit][Delete]: A Laptop in Every Hut?, TechNewsWorld [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
This opinion column argues that the $100 laptop initiative is a group of "open source zealots are looking to export their ideological crusade overseas, creating a need for their commercial services by tying a new generation of young consumers to laptops running on Linux software." The author is from the Pacific Research Institute, listed at SourceWatch. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John Daniel, Asha Kanwar and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic[Edit][Delete]: A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education, Change [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
It would be tempting but wrong to swiftly dismiss this article. The heart of the argument is this: "Undoubtedly, tens of millions of young adults in the third world will be seeking postsecondary education in the coming years... By necessity, those nations are likely to seek a much greater role for private, for-profit institutions than is the case in the developed world. We predict that, seeing a massive market opening, for-profit institutions in the developed world will expand their cross-border provision of educational services, especially distance and e-learning. Establishing quality assurance mechanisms for such rapid expansion thus will be a major challenge for governments."
Leave aside the fact that this crisis was caused by the very people who will now purport to fix it - the World Bank, for example, actively discouraged investments in higher education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Press Release[Edit][Delete]: Statement Regarding Captain Copyright, Access Copyright [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
Today's issue has several of the longer posts I have been writing recently. This is unusual, but I do plan to occasionally include the longer posts. It would be useful to receive feedback on this - do people prefer the 100 word items exclusively, or is it preferable to get as much as 500 words on an item from time to time?
This item is a statement on the revisions proposed for the 'Captain Copyright' comic, an effort that was widely (and justly) criticized. The authors also say they were "saddened by the misconceptions" regardingb their linking policy (despite what the policy actually said). As for me, well, I am wondering whether they have permission to use the 'Canada' logo at the bottom of the page. More...