By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. This Whole Syndication Thing Is Sucking Me Down the Drain...
Brian Lamb ponders the place of syndication in the world. "I blog merrily along, talking about the power of syndication to anyone who will listen... and I'm still trying to achieve what seemed to be just around the corner four years ago... I've had remarkably good luck the past few years with grant applications and conference proposals. But so far, each submission that's focused on RSS or syndication in any way has been rejected -- come to think of it, these have been my only failures." My own work on syndication is similarly unfunded. People want web services and digital rights management and competencies, but few people - few funders, at least - want to see open resource sharing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Have Learned My YouTube Lesson
What I learned yesterday browsing through YouTube is that milk bags are uniquely Canadian (who know?) and how to make PVC-tube rockets (I watched October Sky on the airplane home from Holland). Jim Groom, meanwhile, found the debate between Malcolm X and James Farmer. Kind of makes me look like a low-brow. ;) Anyhow, Groom comments, "YouTube is the most powerful example of how these small pieces can be so easily and effectively joined for a teaching and learning context." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. HumanBrainCloud
Um, hm. It pretty clearly works, even if it hasn't reached full-blown meme scale yet (I am only the 330,000th or so to play). The association bubbles it sprouts are spot on, and will only be more refined over time. The most prolific player is appropriately named 'I_have_no_life'. What do you do with the results of what amounts to a planetary scale word association test. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers - Teacher As Learner
Good post, relevant to the talk I'm doing online for SMOOT (Finland) tomorrow. "The decision to "learn with the students," to use one's own personal blog in the class blogosphere, to engage as a participant and a co-learner, often leads us to think that we will lose the respect of our students and that we will no longer really teach... [but] losing the teacherly voice is not the equivalent of losing the voice of an expert." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CLTI07 - David Snowden the Patternizing Brain
Dave Snowden is generally pretty up on things, and this presentation summary illustrates nicely and simply the major elements of his thinking. "The brain is revealed as a pattern processor, in which original fragments last longer as being relevant than the context they are put in by our brain." The post contains links to more of Snowden's work. It would be nice to have a link to the presentation itself, though. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Government Study: Americans Reading Less
So there is a new study (Full PDF, Executive Summary) that has just been released from the (American) National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) saying that children are no longer reading, that "15- to 24-year-olds spend only 7-10 minutes per day on voluntary reading." There has been much angst about this in the media. But if you actually read the study, you find that they're talking mostly about books - and that things like surfing the web are not considered reading! Perhaps they should examine the behaviour of web users again - I have it on good authority that a lot of time spent on the web is time spend reading (oh, and writing too!). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenSocial On Facebook (Sort-Of)
I subscribed today to a new Facebook application "that appears to make Facebook an OpenSocial container." Basically, what it does is export my friend lists for use by external applications. Jimmy Guterman writes, "One of the developers is from Google. It's unclear what's happening here -- Could this be the beginning of a guerilla attempt to lure Facebook into OpenSocial?" More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World
This is a good post, up to the point where it becomes jingoistic. This much seems true: "if the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things 'by accident,' outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards Knowledge Societies
I was looking at this book-length report (direct link to PDF) from 2005 today, following up some discussion on the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) list. The focus on 'teaching networks' - which the paper encourages, especially by developing countries - carries with it the risk of the commodification of education, and hence, an entrenching as permanent the existing inequities of access to information. If education becomes a commercial product, then no matter how structured, it becomes something only those with resources can afford. We need not only to seek to de-commercialize the distribution. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I
Michael Feldstein does a nice job introducing Desire2Learn's approach to competences. The main point is, "Every competency has at least one learning objective under it. In turn, every learning objective has at least one assessment which is the actual instrument for checking to see if students have met the learning objective." The key to this formulation is flexibility, since competencies depend on the goals of the learning in the first place, abot which there is often no agreement. It is also worth noting that for each learning objective there ought (in principle) to be a learning object, not just an assessment. But can the objectives of learning be reduced (for that's what this is, a reductive process) to competences? I have my doubts, for a variety of reason. More...