By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikipedia's Imminent Demise?
I've mentioned this in passing elsewhere, but it's time, I think, to say it outright. The managers of Wikipedia have been adding layers of oversight and scrutiny. And they plan to add that allow overseers to vet revisions, which means that most readers will not see a revision until it has been reviewed. This will destroy Wikipedia. People are not going to want to contribute if they know it won't be seen until some (anonymous and unqualified) overseer gets around to 'flagging' it. This means that, more and more, it will be the people with an agenda, rather than the people who just want to add good content, that will be contributing to Wikipedia. It's also not going to be long before there are protracted disputes between the overseers and the common editors. The managers at Wikipedia have to stop listening to the critics. They had a perfectly good encyclopedia because anybody could correct the errors. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Zing! Is in the Search Results
I'm not nearly as impressed as Alan Levine (more bad site layout - I really wish these overnight companies would try their sites on a few browsers before launching), but there's enough cool factor to link to EveryZing - which uses automatic transcription to create searchable (and indexable) text from audio to provide search results that include podcasts and videos. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Dartmouth Produces Video Podcasts
A bit chatty, but nonetheless a useful account of how video recordings are produced at Dartmouth. One comment struck me, that there will always be a need for a camera operator. This doesn't strike me as true. I remember when I did videoconferencing in the 1990s at Assiniboine the camera could be voice activated and could also follow an infrared sensor worn by the speaker. As well, it seems to me, hand gestures could be used (assuming the patent trolls ever license the technology) to zoom and point the camera. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time For Replacement Windows
Tim Stahmer quotes Dwight Silverman, and I agree, "Microsoft really has no choice - it can no longer support the ecosystem that has built up for so long. An attempt to add another layer will send it crashing, if that's not happening already. It's time to tear it down, and start again." I always expected this to happen when we moved from 32 bit to 64 bit processors. But it never happened. It took forever to get to that point (I wrote about it in 1998 and the 64 bit chips are just now coming into usage). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beware These Six Lamest Social Networks
This article published in Wired has resulted in the Stop Cyberbullying network on Ning being, in Andy Carvin's words, "flooded with a number of new users who were vandalizing the community in extremely obnoxious ways." I don't know what it is about writers who fling misogynist derogatives about as though they are funny, but I do know that the editors who pass such material through to the publisher have sacrificed any sense of journalistic integrity. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Intro to QEDWiki
John Connell links to this engaging video introducing IBM's QEDWiki (Quick and Easily Done). What the video shows is how you can drag and drop various web services and applications into the editing area to create new mashups. More from IBM here and bundled with DB2. Oracle also has a bundle. QEDWiki is built on the Zend framework, a PHP environment that lets developers easily create maships and mashup engines. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Theories and Models of and for Online Learning
This is a very odd paper, and in fact, is best viewed as six separate contributions from six separate authors working in a common library and information science environment. As a result, what we get are six separate theories, which are more ways of viewing online learning than they are reflective of trends in online learning. The theories all have a vaguely ecological - social network - community of practice flavour. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Researchers Question School in High-Tech Age
A standard education-reform article citing Don Tapscott, every newspaper's favorite tech author. The usual stuff, but I want to focus on this (I know you've seen it before): "Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. U.S. Teen Unlocks the iPhone
A 17 year-old student, armed with a soldering iron and a lot of caffeine, has figured out how to unlock the iPhone's exclusive deal with AT&T. He describes the method in detail on his blog. And here's the video announcing the discovery. There are also reports of software-only hacks (one of which Engadget absolutely swears by, as well as rumblings about legal action from AT&T, which probably won't amount to anything because there's nothing illegal about switching mobile phone providers. Me, I think the lessons in all this are pretty clear. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Porn Filters No Barrier for Net Users
A 16 year-old Australian student took approximately 30 minutes to bypass a government funded content filter that took $84 million to create (other accounts peg the cost at million). He then proceeds to make much more sense than the officials that installed the software, saying, "Filters aren't addressing the bigger issues anyway. Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I'd fix. They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them." More...