By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings From the University of California
Results from a large survey (1118 respondents) of academics in the University of California system. Respondents were self-selected, so the survey will skew to involved and interested in the issue. Among other things, the researchers find that "The current tenure and promotion system impedes changes in faculty behavior" and that "The disconnect between attitude and behavior is acute with regard to copyright". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Teachers Don't Use Web 2.0 - an Historical Perspective
I think that Gary Stager has struck at the heart of what's wrong with the 'School 2.0' movement, a movement that is essentially about teachers using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. He is quite right when he says that many of the proponents have no sense of the history of school reform, and certainly no grasp of the grounds for school reform. As it is now, he suggests, the movement is essentially a leaderless group of anti-intellectualists centered around the tools, not any big or deep ideas. There's a lot more in this post, including a history of Logo and a consideration of some of the thinking behind it. This forms the basis for a sustained set of criticisms of the 2.0 crowd that does deserve a reply, not so much because they're incorrect, but because, in being addressed to people like Warlick and Utecht and Richardson, they're really misdirected. What I have called 'e-learning 2.0' is absolutely not about using Web 2.0 in the schools - it is not about preserving existing structures and existing authority. It is about deschooling, not reschooling, and it is about putting the capacity to learn into the hands of indivduals, wherever they may be, not locking them in a room and blocking their internet access. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Network Learning Environments and Hypertext: Constructing Personal and Shared Knowledge Spaces
This is a very nice paper from 1993 that I found while looking up something else. It just goes to show that the ideas we have been talking about here have been brewing for a long time. Like this, for example: "Network-based information is not a static, fixed 'thing' but rather is dynamic, fluid, and changing." And this: "As networks and information technologies become more wide-spread and integrated into the world of work, the goals of education are shifting from knowing a fixed body of knowledge to knowing how to think independently and how to find information when needed". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PRISM: Open Letter to Cambridge University Press
Peter Murray-Rust writes an open Letter to Cambridge University Press on the subject of PRISM. "The language of PRISM it implies that publishing in Open Access journals (as I do on occasions) is 'junk science'," he writes. "There is much more from PRISM which is both deliberately factually incorrect and misleading and I cannot see how a reputable scholarly organisation such as CUP could be associated with it." Quite so! Briuan Vickery, from BioMed Central, also attacks the veracity of PRISM. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Content-Aware Image Reduction
Traditionally, there were two ways to reduce the size of images. You could either crop them, or you could shrink them (aka 'scaling' them). Each has its disadvantages - when you crop photos, you may cut bits you want to keep, and when you shrink photos, you make the big bits smaller. This video introduces you to 'retargeting', a technique that allows you to keep the things you want to be big, but to just move them closer together. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Avatars Without Virtual Worlds: an Alternative Platform
Sorry about the unscheduled deliveries of OLDaily this morning. They were the result of unscheduled system reboots while I had the 'send newsletter' window open. I promise that mistakes like this will happen again in the future. Anyhow, how do things like this reach 10 million users before I've even heard of them? Some days I think I'm plugged in, other days I really wonder. Stardoll is a site that lets you create your own doll. Or your own avatar. Bryan Alexander finds this gem: "We spoke with CEO Mattias Miksche in July to discuss the importance of avatars versus virtual worlds, and he emphasized the importance of identity and realism over immersiveness." Which raises the question, do avatars need virtual worlds? And the answer is, of course not. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Facebook's Public Search Listing Could Empower Users
Facebook is launching 'public profile' listings, which means that Facebook profiles will be searchable by Google and other search engines. Users can opt to keep their profiles private, though Facebook hasn't exactly been pushing that option. "This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web," comments Om Malik. I'm wondering whether Facebook is trying to become thre de facto OpenID of the web - in direct competition with OpenID. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are PLEs Low Maintenance?
Tom Haskins has posted a number of items over the last few weeks on PLEs. I haven't been linking to most of them because they're mostly just fragments of an idea. But taken collectively they amount to a good discussion. This post links to a number of them (not all of them - he misses this one for some reason). I will have more on all this in the future, but for now, just one comment: 'the middle' of a debate isn't always where you want to be. Because what counts as 'the middle' is too easily manipulated. It's an old political trick - if you want people to adopt, say, a left-wing position, adopt a radical left wing position. This shifts the 'middle' to the left, normalizing the position you want people to adopt. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Instructionally Investing in VoiceThread
Wesley Fryer recommends VoiceThread as a way for classes to capture stories and memories. It looks good. But when I look at their example I'm turned off. Couldn't they have explained it without pictures of a whole bunch of soldiers and guns? Also, the website makes it really difficult to read more information; fortunately, Wesley Fryer provides links like this one to VoiceThread in the classroom. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Feedshow - A Feed Powered Web Page Presentation Tool
I had thought in the past of writing XSLT to convert RSS to S5. But this example of a working Feedshow shows that it makes more sense just to pipe a feed directly into a player. More...