By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reflecting Upon the Difference
Tom Haskins - who writes that "Learning and forgetting are night and day opposites!" - reminds me of a theme I need to develop one day. Learning is not remembering. When Haskins writes "Learning is like clinging to something. Forgetting is like letting go" I think he is saying the opposite of what should be said. Learning, properly construed, is a lot more like 'letting go' than it is like clinging. Think of the 'expert' stage described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus. Think about the advice you read from time to time, about how performance is a matter of 'letting go' of your fears. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Signal
Harold Jarche links to a site called Learning Signal, a new aggregation site that ranks learning-related blogs. He quotes an email from the company: "The posts you're seeing listed on LearningSignal.com are not random. We're actually assigning a score on every post based on a math algorithm." My own experience running this kind of thing with Edu_RSS is that it's really easy to do for a few sites, really hard to do for a few hundred. Which may be why the Learning Signal home page is unresponsive. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning Showcase
After listing new applications daily for a few months, Jane Hart is also listing e-learning 'solutions' that she has run across. This could be really interesting if it were run as a regular feature (though that said my experience from running the NAWeb Awards is that most e-learning is behind a login wall, safely hidden from critical eyes). Of course, if she were to post examples of e-learning on anything like a regular basis, she could well experience the application fatigue that is no doubt beginning to colour her Web 2.0 application perspective. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Debray On the Mediasphere
Interesting diagram describing three types of mediasphere: the logosphere (writing), the graphosphere (printing), and the videosphere (audio-visual). I, of course, have my own column, which I reproduce here (attach to the right of the other three columns:

Netosphere
Group ideal: pattern (network, community)
Figure of time: flow (the river)
Canonical generation: the next generation (signifying change)
Spiritual class: hackers (creators, programmers, writers, rebels)
Legitimating reference: The connected (because it's worth sharing)
Driving force: recognition (connectivism). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. In the Heat of Mocking a Killing Bird
I struggle through Lanny Arvan's posts because he takes a very long time to get to the point (and sometimes never does). I know there's a lot going on in his thinking, but I don't always want all of it when he wants to say something. That said, sometimes the style works very well, at times when it's important to bring disparate threads together. And you can find the point in there, eventually, that in order to teach one thing using role playing with technology, "we have to be overtly about some other use of role playing with technology or some other use of the technology itself." The misdirection - what Larry Pausch described as the 'head fake' in his farewell lecture - is depicted as essential to the teaching of difficult social issues such as racism. Now this may be true - but the much more interesting question is why. This, I think has to do with learning being about experiencing, not telling, and it has to do with education being about what interests the student, not the teacher. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Diamonds in the Mud
Coverage of the Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2007) conference provided by Steve Wheeler (part one, part two, part three). Summaries could be more informative and less, um, colourful ("two papers that shone out like diamonds in the mud in an afternoon of mediocrity"). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web Offerings Spread in 'Battle for Desktop'
Coverage of the spread of Web 2.0 aplications - in this article described as "software as a service" - in the education sector. The focus is on a new report released by Gartner saying that software as a service (SaaS) will grow "seven times faster than on-premise software deployments during the next three years." E-School news only shows the first page of the story; the rest is behind a subscription wall. But you can listen to a Gartner podcast on software as a service from last June. And here's the actual press release from Gartner about the report, dated from August (you'll still have to pay for the report itself though). And here's some advice about SaaS from Information Week. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Thiagi Gameletter: October 2007
I don't link to Thiagi's newsletter because it comes out all in one big lump, so I can't link to individual items. But if you're not familiar with it, you may want to take a look. Thiagi specializes in low-tech learning games, and this newsletter is no exception, with everything from logic puzzles to team games to the single item survey. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brazil's Minister of Culture Calls for Free Digital Society
Gilberto Gil, a musician and social activist who became Brazil's minister of Culture, called for "the freedom to use and republish digital forms of content as a way of encouraging personal expression, culture and political participation" at a conference at MIT. Today's digital technologies represent a fantastic opportunity for democratizing access to knowledge," Gil said. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism
"What's popular?" asks George Siemens. "Tools that aren't broadcast-based: flickr (image sharing), social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo), personal information management (del.icio.us), and collaborative tools like wikis." What's not popular, he notes, are things that are used for broadcasting. Yahoo, for example, closed its podcast directory. He writes, "The initial rush of 'wow, I can post my comments on the web to the world' has given way to 'wow, I don't feel like it'." And thus he links to this article that documents our move from real places to 'lifestyle' places to "discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends." All very good, but I wouldn't over-emphasize the social. I think the social is one type of experience, and that life is filled with many more types of experience. More...