By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Barbara Fister[Edit][Delete]: Rice UP Back in Business - But With a Difference, ACRLog [Edit][Delete] July 14, 2006
The Wall Street Journal, The Book Standard and Inside Higher Ed are covering a story out of Rice University to the effect that Rice's University Press will bgin publishing free online books with revenues drawn from a print-on-demand (POD) publishing service. The initiative is tied together with Rice's Connexions authoring system. Because it is acting as a publisher, services such as selecting and editing will be required, which will be part of the costs Rice expects to incur. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rachel Metz[Edit][Delete]: Google Has No Adsense.com, Wired News [Edit][Delete]Wired news [Edit][Delete] July 13, 2006
AdSense Consulting, which has owned adsense.com since 1996, has finally given up telling people we are not Google and is selling the domain name - Google, which has meanwhile stomped all over the small company's name, has no comment. The least they could have done is let the company run Adsense Ads. But no, not even that. Meanwhile, in another story, the National Post decided it liked a blog post and simply ran the post in the newspaper without permission or payment. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christopher D. Sessums[Edit][Delete]: Teacher Professional Development and the Learning Organization, Christopher D. Sessums : Weblog [Edit][Delete] July 13, 2006
This paper asks, "How can the notion of communities of practice support an inquiry stance by teachers?" By an "inquiry stance," he means "examination and reflection on their teaching practices with an eye towards improving or changing them." Communities of practice provide connections to other practitioners, argues the author, and they "provide the cognitive tools - ideas, feedback, models, and concepts - that educators can adopt." Maybe so, but it should be clear there's a lot more to it than this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alfred Thompson[Edit][Delete]: More on Educational Robotics, Computer Science Teacher [Edit][Delete] July 13, 2006
According to Alfred Thompson, "Microsoft announced that they are partnering with Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr to create a new Institute for Personal Robots in Education. This program is going to deliver robotics technology and curriculum materials for the computer science curriculum." Neat. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mark Oehlert[Edit][Delete]: The Politics of RSS, E-Clippings [Edit][Delete] July 13, 2006
I don't want to minimize the problems in RSS outlined here by Mark Oehlert (though I will point out that that the problems he describes, framing and spamming, are as old as the internet) but from where I sit they stem more from a misunderstanding of RSS than of any fundamental issue that needs to be fixed. They do not effect me at all, because I have never thought of the feed as some sort of 'broadcast' intended to capture 'market share' which would eventually be 'monetized'. The only thing reading these machine-generated feeds is other machines, and if the owner of one machine is silly enough to pay the owner of another machine for the privilege, that does not change my life, nor am I foolish enough to thing this is any sense revenue lost. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tristan McCowan[Edit][Delete]: Approaching the Political in Citizenship Education, Educate [Edit][Delete] July 13, 2006
This paper appealed to me, offering as it does a lucid and worthwhile comparison between the educational philosophies of Paulo Friere and Bernard Crick as it asks whether political education should be a separate subject, asks about its role in promoting conformity, and considers the dangers of indoctrination and the means of promoting political agency.
I liked the statement of Friere's position: "Contemporary society is seen to be characterized by oppression, whereby the oppressed are prevented from being subjects of history, and become mere objects, determined by other people's intentions and without real agency... that human beings must move towards increasing humanization." With this I certainly agree, though I am less inclined than the author to associate Friere with Rousseau's 'general will' - to be free of oppression is to assert one's own will in one's own way, not to be subsumed under a common will (this, too, is the key difference between my view of online organization, such as communities of practice, and that of various other writers). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: TED Talks, July 13, 2006
I spent the afternoon listening to these talks (instead of preparing slide decks (bad Stephen, no cookie!)). Al Gore's talk was great ("Put yourself in my position..." he says, to general laughter). Majora Carter's talk was passionate and motivational. And Tony Robbins was a lot more lucid - and correct - than I had anticipated would be the case. More...