By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Math Education For The Benefit of MasterCard
Discussion of a Roger Schank piece about business perceptions of American education. You certainly have to wonder what their thinking is. Schank writes, "Math is core to MasterCard's business? Are they doing a lot of trigonometry over there at MasterCard? Congruent triangles on the MasterCard logo? How exactly is math core to MasterCard's business? Ah". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People
SixApart (LiveJournal, Movable Type, Vox) announces support for OpenSocial, writing "Honestly, we don't care much about the political battles between big tech companies: We're doing this because this is what it takes for new features, applications, and experiences to happen in the right way for the vast range of communities that we serve." MySpace has joined. Wired also weighs in quoting Jonathon Abrams: "Previous efforts like FOAF [friend of a friend] and OpenID were pretty complicated. For something to be useful from the user's perspective it has to be simple and easy." Meanwhile, view screenshots and screencasts from Marc Andreessen. There's a lot of figuring out to do. And I should also add that as I write there is a huge debate taking place in the open social graph community about whether the Google API is either open or social. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Educational Resources Are Open
Good analysis of what happens when educational resources are open (and, for that matter, why we want them to be open): "When educational resources become open into the natural intertwingularity of the Internet, their hierarchical tree forms, boxing into categories, and ordered sequences quickly break down." Creating open resourcs does not only change the structure of learning, or the structure of society, but it changes the structure of those resources themselves, and hence, of our understanding of what it means to know and to learn. "The only other place I know of where this kind of open connectivity happens is in your brain and mine. Ideas are patterns we connect from all sorts of parts and pieces floating around in memory and observation". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Best Education Blog
The 2007 Weblog awards nominees have been announced. So far as I can judge, none of the finalists in the education category are actually about education; they are political blogs, mostly focused on U.S. K-12 educational policy, or they are blogs by educators, or by students. You have to wonder about the nomination process. Needless to say, neither this blog, nor any of the educationl blogs regularly reported here, made the cut. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Statistics Canada: 26 Percent of Canadians Use Internet for Learning
If you're wondering, that works out to about 8 million Canadians, an impressive number by anyone's tally. And I would say that this figure is under-reported, missing informal learning in its definition of "education, training or school work." Still, I would make the point so strongly as th obvious advertorial content proclaiming that 80% Of Young Adults Say They Would Choose to Go Back to School Online related by the Online Universities weblog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Remembering CAREO
D'arcy Norman reports that CAREO - the Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects - is being mothballed. "CAREO was important, back in 2001-2004, as a prototype. As a sandbox for trying out some of these concepts. As a place to easily host metadata and content and try the repository model. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. Without CAREO, I would likely still be saying that we need centralized institutional repositories to tightly manage resources. But, because of CAREO, I now know that we don't need repositories at the institutional level. Personal repositories are much more powerful, effective, and manageable". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Skeptic'S Take On Academic Blogs
The sceptic's take is not so sceptical, the author having actually blogged, and not merely a critic of them. The main point - with which I am sympathetic - is that it is very difficult to conduct a rich academic discussion in the blogosphere. I think it is easier to consolidate discussions into groups (as the author describes) but this carries with it the weaknesses of groups: the sway of group loyalty, the 'circling of the wagons' mentality. Working in the large, diverse, messy, blogosphere is harder, but it is ultimately richer and deeper. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reflections On Community The Google Video That Results Is Quite Ungainly
My video for the (Re)Presenting Community 07 conference has finally been produced - goodness, what a disaster. The Mac stripped the voiceover from the screen capture, another feature of iMovie 08 (it does this for all screen capture software, making them notoriously hard on the Mac). Still, that did remove the echo, which I guess was a good thing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere
The entire tenor of this Nw York Times article is captured through the following: "Andrew Delbanco, the Columbia humanities professor, said flatly that it would be impossible to put his seminar on war and culture online because 'the energy and spontaneity of discussion among people sitting together in a small room cannot be replicated by electronic exchanges.' His statement, not surprisingly, came in an e-mail message". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Today's Learning Terrain
Nifty illustration found in the badly titled but quite interesting Rather Graphic weblog, a site that focuses on the use of visual language to communicate. I dislike the term 'e-learning 1.3' as well (it sounds way too much like Java nomenclature). What Tony Karrer described as e-learning 1.3 last year is properly a part of e-learning 2.0. More...