By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alternate Reality Games SIG/Whitepaper
Scott Wilson links to this White Paper, now stored as a wiki, and comments, "I think I must be a bit unusual in the EdTech sector as I find ARGs fascinating and full of amazing possibilities, but find Second Life as being rather boring and lacking potential. Maybe I'm missing something." My assessment is similar. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Issues in Developing an International Movement On Open Educational Resources
Coverage of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Open Educational resources programme discussed yesterday. Graham Attwell writes, "Discussions, at least in the informal sessions, have focused on three main issues... internationalism and the role of the programme with relation to the developing world... the assumption of the leading role of universities in the OER movement." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Death Threats Against Bloggers Are NOT "Protected Speech" (Why I Cancelled My ETech Presentations)
Kathy Sierra reports (language and image warning) on some abusive emails and commentary she has been receiving, some of which has been posted anonymously on public websites such as meankids.org (which has now been pulled off the web). She writes, "I now fully understand the impact of death threats. It really doesn't make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat... it's the threat itself that inflicts the damage." Right - and that's why it's not "protected speech". The utterance (ie., the saying or writing) of a death threat isn't an expression of an opinion, it's an act, and an offensive, dangerous, destabilizing and illegal act. It is one example of a class of utterances, known as 'speech acts', which are intended to do things (usually, things that hurt) rather than say things. The publication of offensive cartoons, which I discussed last year, falls into that category. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scholarship in an Age of Participation
I have thought from time to time about starting a journal but I just can't get myself excited at the prospect. I mean, what would be the point? Perhaps this article will get me going. Then again - any process of 'publication' that involves me doing something over and above posting an article on my website automatically gets my goat. If the article is any good, it will have an impact whether or not it is in MLA style, whether or not it is peer reviewed, whether or not there's a 'formal' or a 'paper' version. And if it's not any good, none of that will save it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blinc - Blended Learning Institutions' Cooperative
Link to blended learning resources, including a collection of 73 papers on blended learning - no, I didn't read them all, but I did peruse a few, giving up after reading conclusions like "Teaching on the Web involves more than putting together a colorful webpage". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. YouTube Depends On Us
Some good comments on the Viacom lawsuit against Google, in response to Viacom general counsel Michael Frackas's article in the Washington Post. "Might we begin to suggest that they are beginning to fear spaces like YouTube that provide an open marketplace for user generated content that will quickly overshadow their own piece of the entertainment market?" Might we indeed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sidekiq
The first real improvement to search since Google. And it's accomplished not by aggregating more capacity to the centre, but rather by depending, intelligently, on distributed capacity. Nice. Hate the spelling of the name, though. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities
Only a small percentage of Hewlett money is invested outside the U.S. ($12 million out of $68 million, mostly to Europe, Africa and China) and most of it is given to large institutions (who, IMHO, don't need the money) so I haven't paid strict attention to the foundation's activities supporting open educational resources (OERs) - though, to be sure, the agencies funded, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and Rice's Connexions, have had a far-reaching impact.
Anyhow, about half this report is devoted to summarizing the Foundation's activities. Where it gets interesting is with this: "We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem, is targeted at preparing people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world... We now propose that OER be leveraged within a broader initiative-an international Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) initiative..."
The Foundation, in other words, should embrace Web 2.0. Sort of - the authors pile everything but the kitchen sink into the concept, including rich media, Second Life, virtual organizations, mobile computing and gaming. The report also suggests creating linkages with e-science and cyberinfrastructure (a 'grassroots movement', according to the authors, though "catalyzed by a landmark 2003 report from an NSF-appointed Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel, 'Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.'" - uh huh).
There is no doubt some merit in the concept of the OPLI - it is, after all, very similar to what I recommended in 2005 ("the functions of production and consumption need to be collapsed, that the distinction between producers and consumers need to be collapsed") but in the details (p. 66 ff) there needs to be some hard (and critical) thinking. Why is Globus a model but Google not? Is repurposing the good idea it is made out to be (why not a new resource for each context)? When they say 'service-oriented', do they mean SOA, REST, or JSON? Is automated interchange a good idea? And why oh why would you allow resources that are manifestly not open to be called "open" on the dubious basis that there is "a continuum of openness." And is "smartly instrumented" just a way for the evidence-based people to sneak into the mix?
Hewlett, like I say, goes for the institution-based solution, and this report plays right into that (and the authors even offer to recommend funding candidates). OERs don't yet exist, and this report recommends a move away from them. More...