By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Paul Kobulnicky[Edit][Delete]: Scholarly Reputations: Who's Got Buzz?, EDUCAUSE Review [Edit][Delete]EDUCAUSE REVIEW [Edit][Delete] November 30, 2006
I think the author both understates the value of public perception (and confuses it with marketing) and overstates the value of the peer reviewed publication. But the straw man question - "choose (1) to have their work published in the premier journal in their field or (2) to have that work regularly come up on the first screen in an appropriate Google search" - is intriguing, and while I don't think even open access will resurrect what passes for quality in academic journals, and while I don't agree that "cpublic opinion is hardly swayed by the relative degrees of prestige accorded to various publishers" I agree. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson[Edit][Delete]: Hodgins Ponders the Future of Metadata, While Revising the Past and Present, November 30, 2006
Scott Wilson comments on Hodgins's The Future of Metadata (posted here yesterday) and in a short post levels a barrage of (well-deserved) criticism at the piece. He writes, "There is some good stuff in here on future work, but to be honest it would be better off ditching most of the legacy rather than trying to convince us of what a wonderful success its been, and all this new stuff is logical progression. After all, anyone talking about 'secondary metadata' or 'usage metadata' a few years ago was being scoffed at by the LOMerati. What we needed was more, even higher quality, expert-produced metadata, whatever the cost!" Quite right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens[Edit][Delete]: Knowledge and Our Structures of Learning, Elearnspace [Edit][Delete]ELearnSpace [Edit][Delete] November 30, 2006
George Siemens continues his conversion to business consultant: "To survive, all organizations need to embrace experimentation - an ongoing 'blood in the corporate veins' type of experimentation. Policy-induced change can be effective, but most often, if we follow the lessons of evolving organisms, developing corporate competence progressively is the best approach for long-term sustained change." If I were writing a corporate management bible, I would write it very differently. It's all very well to teach managers about networks, but I don't think they're really interested in networks. They're interested, if you will, in making friends and influencing people. Well, mostly the latter. Alas, poor Carnegie. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nancy White[Edit][Delete]: Chocolate and Collaboration, Full Circle Online Interaction Blog [Edit][Delete] November 30, 2006
Nancy White explores the different flavours of collaboration: "It is the collaboration chocolate confection. There is that perfect truffle center, rich and dark (the team). There is the robe of chocolate, dusting of cocoa, the company of other truffles nearby (the community). Then there is the fantastic universe of chocolate, the breadth and dizzying depth of possibility (the network)." All very well, but when is each appropriate? I have suggested that some are more appropriate when an emotional connection is needed, while others are more so when an intellectual connection is needed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Press Release[Edit][Delete]: New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians, Internet Industry Association [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
Opposition to the proposed new copyright legislation in Australia continues to mount. "A family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings 'Happy Birthday' in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320." Via TALO, a lengthy list of submissions to the government (so at least they can't say "we had no way of knowing") and a series of risk assessments from the Internet Industry Association. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wayne Hodgins[Edit][Delete]: The Future of Metadata, Off Course - On Target [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
Wayne Hodgins, who started blogging in October, offers this glimpse at his vision of the future of metadata. Note the effective embedding of a slide show in the blog post using SlideShare. As for the vision, well, it's good to see people talking about attention metadata (what I have called second-party metadata) and more on automatically generated metadata. But I question the emphasis on competencies that characterizes his recent work. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jody Clark and Chris Dede[Edit][Delete]: Robust Designs for Scalability, The River City Project [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
Chris Dede has been working on MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) recently and though he has been, with various partners, writing a lot, he's hard to track because he unfortunately has not yet discovered RSS. Still, you'll want to have a look at this paper, in part because it addresses what is in my mind a critical issue for MUVEs, scalability (I contend that as long as they depend critically on human instructors, they don't scale; Dede focuses mostly on the technology and how to get (mostly unwilling) instructors into the environment in the first place), but also in part because of the mathematical renderinsg of the "effect size" and the "'ccalability Index' that estimates the relative sensitivity of innovations to attenuation in various dimensions that represent their conditions for success." I like MUVEs. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Steve Hargadon[Edit][Delete]: Thinking about Thinking and about Educational Commerce, EdTechLive [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
More audio goodness as an interview I gave to Steve Hargadon is now online. He writes, "Granted, folks in Canada are probably more used to government-run solutions than we in the States, but it sorrows me to think--if Stephen is representative--that we have determined that the form and function of for-profit businesses forces them to make decisions which are not in the interests of anyone but themselves. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George H. Buck[Edit][Delete]: The First Wave: The Beginnings of Radio, Journal of Distance Education [Edit][Delete] November 28, 2006
My very first exposure to the concept of distance learning was a documentary film on the School of the Air in Australia, from which I learned about the use of radio to provide an education to children living on sheep stations in the Outback. So it was a highlight of my trip to Australia in 2004 when I was able to visit the School in Alice Springs and use the modern version of their network to talk about the today's version of the same thing. Now along comes this absolutely fascinating look at the Canadian equivalent, offered through (of all places) the Canadian National Railway. I have actually heard the phrase, "CBC educated," which speaks to the power of radio as a learning medium in Canada, and I think of my own experiences as a child at home or out camping or driving the highway to Slave Lake or in my small cabin, listening to the comforting words of people like Lister Sinclair and Peter Gzowski and I realize with a start that I too am 'CBC educated'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tony Hirst[Edit][Delete]: OpenLearn Daily Learning Chunks via RSS, OUseful Info [Edit][Delete] November 28, 2006
It was only a matter of time before someone developed this (I have been calling them 'RSS Scripts') - RSS feeds for serialized episodes that start at the beginning no matter when you subscribe. Tony Hirst is experimenting with them. "Just like 'tip of the day', materials can be delivered one small chunk at a time once per day to the informal learner's feed reader. More...