By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boanerges Aleman-Meza and others[Edit][Delete]: Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, WWW 2006 [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
This is a great paper. The discussion is directed toward the use of links within a social network to detect a potential conflict of interest. This would help editors select reviewers for journal articles (OK, so the authors are still rooted in the old world - let it go). Two networks, FOAF and the bibliographic literature in Computer Science research, are used. What we get in this paper is a nice series of steps (and cool diagram) that characterize such semantic analyses:
1. Obtaining high quality data
2. Data preparation
3. Entity disambiguation
4. Metadata and ontology representation
5. Querying and inference techniques
6. Visualization
7. Evaluation
It's interesting to see just how many real and potential conflicts of interest appear among the authors. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Konrad Glogowski[Edit][Delete]: Students Reflect on Group Work, Blog of Proximal Development [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
His comments on group work, he says, "follow him around." I'm not surprised. Questioning group work is like questioning the Pope. Glogowski reports on some parent and student reactions to group work, including a memo from the principal to all staff pointing out "some students feel that they are 'left out,' 'stuck with,' or 'looked past' during group work. Many of these kids have other social stresses to deal with. Can we all please make every effort to alleviate this stress during class time?" People continue to say group work sometimes benefits students. I don't deny that. But I will argue that its use cannot be justified unless it can be known that it does not produce harm. But there is, sadly, no "do no harm" principle in education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: The Webcast Academy, [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
Interesting. "The Academy is a hands on, collaborative training center for people interested in learning how to produce and host live, interactive webcasts. You can learn more about The Webcast Academy here." What's kind of weird is that instead of posting the learning material in some easily accessible format, they have regular meetings (called 'classes') that you have to attend at certain times. Don't know what that's about; it certainly isn't very user-friendly. And why oh why would they make the section headings out of Flash. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mike Seyfang[Edit][Delete]: Avoid YouTube if you wanna ReMix and MashUp, Mikes MSN blog [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
The funny thing I noticed about this blog - because the RSS produced by MSN spaces is broken, the RSS comes from edublogs and points to the Spaces site. Anyhow, the essence of the article is in the title - because YouTube allows only streaming, and no downloads, it does not support remixing. Which is less than idea, to be sure. I am not convinced by the comments on Creative Commons - I use a 'non-commercial' license on my stuff because I don't want some company pulling a Blackboard on it - using it commercially then turning around and claiming it's their property. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Leslie[Edit][Delete]: dLCMS - Open Source LCMS built on Silva/Zope, EdTechPost [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
Scott Leslie reports on the dynamic Learning Content Management System. "It stores resources in XML format and has created packages which have been successfully imported into OLAT, ILIAS, Moodle and WebCT. It looks to have been produced by ETH Zurich (and possibly on soft money that's now run out) but possibly worth a look." The software is written in Python (which is a script-like computer language) which means you don't need a huge enterprise system to run it. Worth looking into further. Related: leslie offers a less than positive review of XERTE, a free visual editor for SCORM compliant Flash learning objects. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: Criticism of academicblogs.org, BlogScholar [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
The stewards of BlogScholar write, "Here at BlogScholar.com we always appreciate a nice tribute but surely its taking it a bit far to launch an 'Academic Blog Portal' without a single reference to our delightful little non-profit enterprise of the same name on the other side of the Atlantic." BlogScholar is a reviewed system ("for every blog that is accepted in the directory ten are declined") while the Academic Blog Portal, a spin-off from Crooked Timber, is a wiki with no apparent selection at all. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Geoff Minshull and Judith Mole, eds.[Edit][Delete]: Innovating e-Learning 2006: Transforming Learning Experiences, Jisc [Edit][Delete]JISC [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
Putting conference proceedings online is a good idea, even for online conferences (which are often buried or lost after they are held). Summarizing the proceedings is a good idea - in the Learner Experiences theme, for example, there were 453 messages exchanged. I am rather less convinced that putting the proceedings into clumsy PDF texts was a good idea. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: Play is Essential for Optimal Development, Canadian Council on Learning [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
This is a very good article, probably the best thing I've seen come out of CCL yet (you just want to shoot the web designer though, there's no navigational links to (say) the 'Lessons in Learning' series, there's no RSS, and it (normally) appears in a gosh-awful pop up window). Essentially the article is a sustained defense of play in support of learning, but if you look at what is being described you can see it is the very sort of learner-directed open-ended approach discussed so often in these pages. Indeed, reducing or eliminating this open-ended approach is actually harmful to the child (the adult too, I would say - the highlight of my week this week has been beating the Washington Capitals 11-2 last night on EA Hockey). Note also that 'play' does not mean some sort of solitary and unsupported activity; the article discusses roles for adults as "co-players" and the like. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael R. Gettes[Edit][Delete]: Introduction to Identity Management: The Big Picture, Educause [Edit][Delete]EDUCAUSE [Edit][Delete] November 22, 2006
Very good (though large - 6 meg , and EDUCAUSE isn't the fastest site in the world) slide deck on identity management (I link to the EDUCAUSE HTML page, since there are actually three separate decks to download). If you are into identity at least as much as I am, then this presentation will be worth your while. Note how tangled identity becomes with institutional policies and other tasks, like managing access to resources. Ask yourself whether an identity federation is a sustainable model for an open network of free resources and services. Finally, ask yourself, what's in it for the person being identified. Because, as I argue in Authentication and Identification, no identity system will work unless the person wants their identification to be accurate and secure. More...