By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Carlyle and the Search for Authority
"The authority of the hierarchical state was being challenged, and political discourse, like religious discourse, had begun to represent authority as vested in the individuals that con­stituted the state rather than in monarchical hierarchy. ... Society was understood as a series of contracts among competing individuals in­stead of a corporate body united as a single family." Sound familiar? No, it's not Web 2.0. Rather, these sentences describe the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, the subject of Thomas Carlyle's work in the 1800s. This book - and 49 others on different topics - have now been made available for free (on PDF, sadly) by The Ohio State University Press. Good for them. Let's see more of this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Having Your Cake and Eating It: The E-Framework's Service-Oriented Approach to IT in Higher Education
"The soa [service oriented architecture] seeks to separate out the core functionalities needed by a number of different applications into a series of modular components, provided as loosely coupled services." So far so good. But then, "the functions or tasks need to be provided with an agreed-upon open interface, and the wider the agreement is on these tasks, the greater the market for such services and the lower the price." Um, hm. But then, "considerable time and effort of experienced and technically skilled people is needed to establish such agreements." Well, that's really going to favour the entities that can fund such people, isn't it? But I digress. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix
Brian Lamb leads off the current issue of EDUCAUSE Review with a look at the mash-up - and demonstrates the form with an audio mashup (MP3) of his own. From the audio: "DRM is an arms race between the major corporations and 13-year olds in Finland. And the 13-year olds are winning." yeah. "Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Woodbury University Island Destroyed
Second Life administrators at Linden Labs have removed an island owned by Woodbury University in response to "incidents of grid attacks, racism and intolerance, persistent harassment of other residents, and crashing the Woodbury University region itself while testing their abusive scripts." As the authors write, "the question of 'ownership' of virtual land is brought into stark focus here. Will Woodbury write off its investment in virtual real estate? Will the Lindens refund all or part of their payments?". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Easy Peasy Rich Media - VoiceThreads
I love this. "Basically you upload photos (integration from flickr allows you to pull them directly from a set there, nice), and the flash editing interface allows you to add audio narration to images, which play back as a slideshow." Alan Levine looks at multiple uses for the service. More...