By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Music Industry's Piracy Tune Gets Old
This article is a typical, slightly less on-sided than usual, back-to-school item about music industry lawsuits against students. It would not be worth mentioning, except perhaps as yet another example of misleading propaganda. But the comments in response to the article more than make up for it. Should anyone from the Globe and Mail actually read the comments, they would learn than the Canadian public is not fooled. And can the newspaper stop printing phony institute reports as though they were 'research'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 and Policy
The email advert reads as follows: "Many of you will have seen the JISC-funded report by Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen on Web2.0 services and their implications for sharing elearning content, especially the implications for universities and colleges. We've now drafted a JISC response to the recommendations in this report..." The report, boiled down as recommendations, consists of a string of statements saying "JISC should fund such-and-such". The response is invariably "JISC is already funding such-and-such" or "JISC is considering it". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Leveraging Multimedia for eLearning by Ruth Clark
Helge Scherlund links to and summarizes a PDF white paper on multimedia in e-learning authored by Ruth Clark for Adobe. The advice is pretty straight-forward, things like using graphics, things like keeping lessons short, and things like creating relevant practice-based interactions. The paper isn't interested in community and is mostly performance-focused. And the theory of learning offered - basically a description of encoding audio and visual perceptions in long and short term memory - is quaint and in some ways misleading. Finally, a note for bloggers: please don't use those 'SnapShots' popups over links. They are as annoying as anything, especially when you have a lot of links on your page. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Networks, Ecologies, and Curatorial Teaching
There has been an interesting discussion on the iDC list of new media as a form of curation rather than merely creation, especially contributions by Barbara Lattanzi and Pamela Jennings, and it is in this light that I read George Siemens on 'Curatorial Teaching'. "The joint model of network administrator and curator form the foundation of what education should be," he writes. "An expert (the curator) exists in the artifacts displayed, resources reviewed in class, concepts being discussed. But she's behind the scenes providing interpretation, direction, provocation, and yes, even guiding." I don't think it's that automatic and that all-embracing. There's an aspect of curation that stresses presentation, and to that degree it is similar to teaching. And there's an aspect of curation that stresses interpretation, and to that degree it is similar to learning. And it's the latter, I think, that's more interesting. With curation, we are presented with the opportunity to observe an expert strive for understanding within a field. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. No Mr. PLoS, I Expect You to DIE!!!!
Controversy surrounds an organization called PRISM, or the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. Essentially, the organization is arguing that open access is undermining peer review, opening the door to government intervention and selective censorship, and introducing duplications and uncertainty. PRISM, which was established by The Executive Council of the Professional&Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit the open access movement through propaganda and misinformation. Of course, it would help is the critics of PRISM didn't hide behind pseudonyms like 'The Evil Monkey'. More...