By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OUNL Learning and Working Environment (Final)
I find it very positive that the Open University of the Netherlands is working on a PLWE (personal learning and working environment). Five posts: VLE of the future, Part 1, Continuing Debate, Part 2, Final. It's still very early in their process, but I think this does signal a bit of a change of direction, and a good one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will Richardson and Gary Stager - Live: The Bootleg Video
Funny. Will Richardson and Gary Stager took the main stage - sans technology - at the NYSCATE Conference in Rochester, NY. There was a professional video recorded, and it may one day appear on some website. But David Jakes turned his webcam around and recorded the session using his computer, streaming the session live using UStream.tv. Here is Will Richardspn's response. This is exactly what web 2.0 - and e-learning 2.0 - is about. The sound isn't perfect (and you can hear dishes clacking) but we can easily undersatnd what they're saying, see the video just fine, and enjoy the interesting discussion. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Use of E-Learning Is Up
According to a recently released ASTD report, one third of workplace learning is now e-learning, with about two thirds of that being self-study and one third instructor-led online classes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndication Dragging Us Down... (a Rant)
Tom Hoffman comments on the slow adoption of syndication. "We aren't seeing what we thought we'd be seeing: individual sites exchanging data in a wide variety of ways. We're seeing big sites that pass the data around internally very effectively and also offer their own API's, but not so much common, open standards." No, we're seeing silos. We have always known there would be silos, and always argued against them. I know, you don't have to believe me - and many don't (I just got a snark in my email for not supporting a centralized video conferencing solution). But silos are winning, right now, because most of the peer-to-peer stuff was made illegal or blocked by providers. There was a period of time when it would have seemed a lot more reasonable to bet the farm on Compuserve or GEnie or Prodigy, not against some low-tech peer to peer stuff like Fido-Net or ARPA. That was then. ARPA became the internet, and the silos became history. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Is It No Longer An Implementation Error?
I've had my criticisms of PISA in the past. But it's hard to top this: "The New York Times reports that errors in the testing booklet of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has caused the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to invalidate all of the American test results." Chris Lehmann asks, "What of the kids who took that test and halfway through it, realized that the test was wrong but couldn't do anything about it? What of the kids who, a few years ago, took the NY State Physics Regents and then had to sweat out their high school graduation after they bombed it, waiting until the state admitted that they screwed up the test?" More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reader: Web 2.0 and Education
Useful list of references that might be considered the 'basic readings' on web 2.0 and learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Airplane Tracking in Second Life
I've got to pass along this video. The authors created a large floor-map of southern California in a room on Second Life. They then wrote an application that tapped into a web service providing the (time-delayed) locations of every airplane in the skies over southern California. This information was fed into Second Life as a formatted text file, and translated to become little tiny aircraft flying over the map, in the air. You can walk around the map and look at them, even reach out and touch them. As you watch, the map continues to update, so the planes move (in 60 second jumps). Fabulous. What a way to teach people how air traffic control works. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RepositoryMan
Leslie Carr of RepositoryMan is asking whether anyone has a list of blogs relevant to repositories. I know of no such list, and there probably isn't one - Technorati reveals four blogs (of course, Technorati has been very sick recently). If you know of a repository blog, or run one yourself, why not drop a comment onto his blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Amazon Kindle: Books You Can Never Share
How Amazon (and presumably its publishing partners) views the world of books: "You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can You Say Convergence?
Jeff Whipple writes, "The new Livescribe paper-based computing platform is due out at early in the next year. Complete with a 'smartpen', e-paper, applications, etc, this system will allow users to write, much like on traditional paper. The difference is that content is digitally translated, stored and is sharable via email or other tools like blogs." More...