By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Setting Learning Free
The open source movement is beginning to recognize the open courseware and open educational resources movements. This article is pretty much party line (ie., "In the Beginning was MIT, and They Invented Open Content") but the more important thing is that it captures the appeal of open content and shows the beginnings of awareness that there is an entire community behind it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Democracy 2.0
I haven't said much about democracy and governance in these pages, not directly at least, because my attention has been directed elsewhere. But it has always struck me that attempts to implement e-democracy have been stuck in a 19th century model of governance, one that enshrines the representative function as the almost definitive of democracy. What is democracy, after all, without votes for your representatives? And yet - embodied in this epitome is the very idea of disempowerment, the idea (straight from Hobbes) that we surrender our own liberty in exchange for security and safety (and the other elements of 'good government'). The idea that we could govern ourselves is not merely rejected as wrongheaded, but as dangerous. As though we - who, after all, elect our (mostly untrustworthy) representatives, cannot be entrusted with our own governance. And so we have evolved into a system of government that is mostly about wresting power and control from each other, and not about the collective safety and security - a model that leads us chaotically lurching from Iraq to global warming to Darfur to Enron. I believe that we, as a people, could do a better job governing ourselves than could our elected representatives (especially those more interested in looting us than leading us) and that internet communication technologies make self-governance possible. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Taipei

Greetings from Taiwan, where I am just packing for the long return flight home. My visit has been interesting and engaging - greatly aided by the super-competent volunteers who have been working here with Lucifer Chu. My email is now working, just in time for the flight. Anyhow, today I have only one photo, but I will post the rest next week. Stephen Downes, Flickr June 14, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenCourseWare Consortium Forum
Mentioned today at the conference in Taiwan. John Dehlin gave me credit and thanked me for spurring this on, which was a nice gesture. Still in its early stages, but it's goot to see a place for people to discuss open courseware and the consortium. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Most Popular Blogs!
TonNet questions the 'top 15' lists provided by Technorati and eBizMBA, lists which are, of course, completly different. What was interesting about eBizMBA was that it combines rakings from various tracking services. So of course I was curious to see how my site was viewed by these various services. Here's the result (ranking in brackets) at SiteExplorer, Snapshot (151,759th), Quantcast (312,342th), and Alexa (119,548th). I don't use Feedburner. Technorati ranks me 4,112 (interestingly, that's a drop of 1100 since yesterday!). The result is that the traffic statistics are essentially fictions - there's a wide variety among the services and none of them comes close to estimating the actual number of readers. All of these services offer ways to make your data 'more accurate' by letting them track your readers - and I suspect your 'more accurate' traffic is significantly higher. More...