By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. M-Learning: Two Years: Two Life Times
Alexander Hayes at his best, linking the technology with the people with the vision. "Despite the organizational reluctance to engage... our esteemed colleagues charge on... extraordinary people with great courage and foresight who link research with practice." A lyrical presentation that at one highlights numerous projects and people working on mobile learning and which may also contain the longest single sentence in the history of presentations. And it strikes me again how disappointing it is that we has some of the most expensive mobile phone rates in the world here in Canada, a short-sighted policy that has slowed adoption and stifled research. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Windows Genuine Advantage Crashes: Everyone'S a Pirate
I have argued at length in the past about the dangers of centralized registry-based DRM such as Windows Genuine Advantage. This is why. The single point of failure renders all your documents - document you own, documents you may have actually authored - inaccessible. More links from Metafilter. And Daring Fireball. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Podcasts From KM Australia
If you haven't seen any of Dave Snowden's slide shows, you should give this page a look, especially the first presentation on on sense-making and the current state of KM. Also included is a workshop, with Etienne Wenger, on Complex Acts of Knowing and a summary of Social Network Stimulation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Memramcook

Photos from my cycling trip through the nearby village of Memramcook on Sunday. Stephen Downes, Flickr August 27, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The 133rd Carnival of Education
The other day I wrote about the edublogosphere clustering (The Blogosphere is a Mesh). This is a good example. The writers at the Carnival of Education focus mostly on teaching and education policy. Obviously they have a viable community and the carnival structure ensures that even though there are some slightly more popular reads - like Education Wonk and Joanne Jacobs - mostly they all read each others' blogs. Read to the end of this post for some interesting stats on the nature of this community and for this list of education bloggers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What, No Whales in the Minnesota River?
An object lesson in the need for critical thinking - or at the very least, basic awareness of the world around you - as a couple from Texas is fooled into visiting the (fictional) city of Mankato, Minnesota to visit the underwater city, the pyramids, whales in the Minnesota River, and of course the Sclare/Far Fissure, which ensures the winter temperature never drops below 70 degrees. Meanwhile, I posted a few days ago about the very real attractions here in the city of Moncto. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can XML Be Efficient? W3C Thinks So
You have to wonder about the W3C sometimes. It took two years (a "W3C minute") to respond to the concern that XML files take too long (and use up too much processor power) to parse. It's a legitimate complaint - if you've tried to access my site and found it stalled, it's because Edu_RSS, which reads RSS, is parsing XML files. So what's the W3C's response? Binary XML. Not surprisingly, it hasn't been greeted with enthusiasm. Because it means that we would have to compress and decompress XML files, and then still parse them. In the meantime, I look at things like JSON, where the data comes in a package that needs no parsing at all. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching How To Learn
Thanks to Michael Coghlan for sending this shortish video of Tony Buzan talking on the subject of teaching children how to learn, with a focus on creativity. I am pretty much in agreement with his argument. I have been creative all my life, and I have seen how it is depicted as "not normal" and discouraged throughout the educational process. But as Buzan argues, "'normal' is not natural... we are teaching uncreativity." Good video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Take Your Class Sky High with Google Earth
Everyone is going gaga over Google Sky (which really should be been titled Google Space) and so I took it for a test run yesterday. It's pretty nice, but not as nice as other space view programs I've seen. The zoom is impressive, but the Hubble images are a bit abrupt and the images of the planets look like little icons that have been glued into place - zoom in, zoom out, the plants stay the same size. Tacky. And there's no names for the stars, just the constellations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School Textbooks, Yes or No
Discussion continues on the issue of whether schools should purchase textbooks. Karen Romeis says books have always been a "treasure trove" to her. George Siemens writes, "I'm not convinced that technology is deterministic - i.e. that we must inexorably trudge the path down which it leads." But that is not the position at all; the call to stop purchasing textbooks has nothing to do with technological determinism. Dennis Coxe, meanwhile, calls my own position "a bit too radical for me." I don't think it's radical at all. The money we spend on textbooks is wasted. We could put the same content onto websites, we could do it for free (because it's not like our academics are paid much of anything by publishers as it is) and the kids would be more comfortable with it. More...