By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER Recommender
This is a very nice way to work with things that are not textbooks. "OER Recommender links you to open education resources related to web pages you are browsing." Outstanding! I'd like to see a (paper-based) textbook do that! The only real problem I see with it is that it requires the Greasemonkey Foirefox extension, and then another Firefox extension (these also work in Flock). It's not that I don't like the extensions, it's just that I would prefer the feature to be browser-neutral. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I'll state right up front that I disagree with Vicki Davis's position here. But it should be stated. She writes, "I personally have to underline, write, rewrite, take notes in the margin and work with the text. I just have to. It is how I learn." Fair enough. And I absolutely think that you need to work with the material in order to learn it. When I was in university I also spent a great deal of time rewriting texts on paper (lectures too, which I transcribed as I listened to them). Now I use a computer to do this - and it's an important skill to have. Yes, some people still do it the old way. They shouldn't. And some people today just cut and paste from electronic texts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Call for a Textbook Purchasing Moratorium
I have been calling on libraries to stop purchasing books and journals, and to instead coordinate the open archiving of the content produced by the instutution they serve. This call from Wesley Fryer on schools mto stop purchasing textbooks is in a similar vein - the practice is wasteful and expensive and isn't preparing children for the future. "Education cannot and will not change in the basic, fundamental ways we need and should want it to change in the twenty-first century as long as textbooks, paper, and pencils continue to be the predominant technologies for student expression and individualized access to content". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Media In and Out of School: Notes From the Creating and Connecting Report
Report from a study in the U.S. "96 percent of teens and tweens between the ages of 9 and 17 with Internet access in the U.S. are using social networking technologies such as chat, text-messaging, blogging, or visiting online communities such as Facebook and MySpace." I wonder how many of them read books. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft's Class Action
This is a good article, well worth reading, that looks at both the benefits of Microsoft's involvement with school redevelopment in the Philadelphia school system, but also touches on some of the dangers of corporate involvement in redefining education. When schools come to depend on the infusion of talent and money from a corporation, what happens when the corporation pulls out (or threatens to pull out unless the learning takes on a pro-corporate spin)? I think schools - and, indeed, the concept of schooling - can and should include many of the ideas Microsoft is bringing to the table. But what we see at this school is an intensive, hands-on and expensive way of doing it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Enterprise 2.0 - Social Networking Within the Firewall
Good slide show by Scott Gavin that I'm going to share with my own colleagues here at NRC (once my email is working again). I have depicted this shift in internal communications as the shift from 'document driven management' (relying on things like Word documents and Excel spreadshets) to 'data driven management' (where people use simple Web 2.0 interfaces to report progress and let the software take care of the reporting, etc.). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Software Is Built - Open Source and Closed Source
"How is software built in the real world? How are open source and closed source development projects different? How are they the same? How do companies leverage different development styles and ecosystems?" Alfred Thompson suggests readers look at the How Software is Built blog at Microsoft containing mostly interviews with leading software developers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eXe 1.0
eXe 1.0 has launched. eXe is "an Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe can export content as self-contained web pages or as SCORM 1.2 or IMS Content Packages". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
"In the arts," argue the authors, "the pathetic fallacy is the act of ascribing human feelings to inanimate objects." The same sort of fallacy is informing internet data representations. "On the semantic web... researchers are (perhaps subconsciously) allowing the computer's internal representation of data to influence the way their tools present information to users." Specifically, the authors decrie the overuse of the "Big Fat Graph (BFG)." Note the terminology again: "By graph, we mean representations with nodes [ie., entities] and edges [ie., links] to model the relationships within the space represented". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mugshot
This is a new site from red Hat that allows you to "Show updates from all your sites on one page, get live updates from friends [and to] share content from MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, blogs and more." I think I made an account here a while back; I don't recall writing about it. Or maybe not; the YouTube account ('Downes') isn't mine. Maybe it made it for me? Anyhow, here's my Mugshot page. Related: code on openfriendformat.com that takes your contact data from networks like Digg and Del.icio.us and creates FOF files out of it. Example. Why isn't Facebook on the list? because Facebook doesn't share. See also Phillip Pearson on decentralized social networking. And on the idea of pulling together your different social networks under one OpenID, see ClaimID. More...