By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Learning Federation: A Nationwide Initiative to Encourage Development of Interactive and Interoperable Learning Objects in the Schools Sector
Written entirely in politic-speak (and hardly resembling an interview at all) this article nonetheless gives readers a good feel for The learning Federation. "There are collaborative groups to: focus on scoping the content within the curriculum priorities; provide feedback through the content design and development process and use of the content within a teaching and learning context; collaborate on specifications, infrastructure, metadata, and intellectual property issues. The single greatest challenge for Curriculum Corporation is to ensure these groups work effectively in their roles." Yes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning Mythbusters #3
I think that there is a point to this commentary. The suggestion is that, while community is important in learning, students do not want to create a community in their class (online or otherwise). Why? Because they already have a whole bunch of communities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Spiders and Starfish
Summary of a recent book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, another book about centralized versus decentralized organizations. The authors talk about a 'sweet spot' half way in between (say) Craigslist and department stores - but when the distributed alternatives work so well, one wonders what's so 'sweet' about breaking that model, even if only a little bit. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Design Bash: Moving Towards Learning Design Interoperability
The 'design bash' concept is a good idea in itself, but I am highlighting this post because of the way it describes three types of interoperability: conceptual, semantic and syntactic. Now I wouldn't define these as the author does. I think semantic interoperability has to do with meaning, and not whether or not a given function is present. This, along with interoperability of format, should be classified as syntactic interoperability. That also allows us to classify what the author calls 'conceptual' interoperability as a type of semantic interoperability. Why is this rewriting important? Because while I think syntactic interoperability is a good idea, I think striving for semantic interoperability is dangerous and misguided. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Passive Voice for Web 2.0 Writing
As with any rule, the recommendation to "use the active voice" has its exceptions. An example is shown in this Jakob Nielsen column, where, when readers read only the first two words, use of the passive voice may actually offer more information. Well, sure. Because what we really need to note is that the subject of our sentence ought to be what we are talking about - and sometimes (usually) the subject does the acting, but sometimes, what is important is that the subject is acted upon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Design Matters and Flat Classroom Project 2007 Keynote
Julie Lindsay enthuses about Dean Shareski's 'Flat Classroom Project keynote Address' (Vicki A. Davis does too) and posts the video on her website. "Yes, we all agree 'design does matter' but what also matters in this flat world is immediacy, communicating a message so that the concepts are accessible, and having fun doing it." I like this sort of initiative, but I'm less comfortable with the use of the word 'flat', as in 'The World is Flat', when it so evidently is not. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web2Summit: Opening Up the Social Graph
A lot of things are happening very quickly in the social identity space. This post, which appeared a couple of days ago, is already a bit out of date. No matter; here are the latest slides from David Recordon and Brad Fitzpatrick. And here is the key thought for the day: "A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform." Quite right. Don't invest too much in one platform. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Typology of Learning Object Repositories
"The state of the art of LORs (Learning Object Repositories) in 2007," writes Rory McGreal, "can be described as functional and growing." Some interesting bits, including a discussion of DRM (when users encounter access restrictions, they just leave) and the reusability paradox (McGreal cites Hodgins's distinction between reuse and repurposing, but it is not clear how this addresses the problem). He also notes some of the criticisms of learning objects, countering with access statistics from Connexions and OCW (not that these are 'Learning Objects' properly so-called). The major deliverable in this paper is his typology of learning object repositories: "Content repositories; Linking or metadata repositories; and hybrid repositories that host content and link to external LOs." The fake link provided in the Handle record link takes you to a DSpace record, which is user-hostile; the link to the actual paper and table are hidden in the grey shaded area (lower right) and titled 'View/Open'. More...