By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Future of Reading
The e-book reader rears its head again, this time as the Kindle (named "to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge"). It is about the same size as a paperback, with a bulge along the 'spine'. The Kindle is backed by Amazon, which gives it a bit more heft that previous attempts; there will be more than 88,000 titles available for sale on launch. Also, you can subscribe to newspapers such as Le Monde, or "You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog." The device will cost $US 399 at launch, according to this article - which puts it in range of the small computers being manufactured for learning - like the Asus Eee (See Miguel Guhlin). Which raises the question of why you would buy a device that is deliberately inhibited in function instead of the computer? And are there any blogs you really want to pay every month to read. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. UniProt, URNs, PURLs
This just so neatly underscores my own view, and hnce, my opposition to things like CORDRA: "the draft W3C Technical Architecture Group finding URNs, Namespaces and Registries, which addresses the questions 'When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?' and 'Should registries be provided for such identifiers?'. The answers given are 'Rarely if ever' and 'Probably not'." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID - Every Student Should Have One
Summary of the OpenID event that took place in London last Thursday, with links to photos, slides and blog entries. Andy Powell writes, "t seems to me that this is a good example of why the education community stands to gain by going with more mainstream approaches such as OpenID". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interview with Stephen Downes at SURF Education Days 2007
After the SURF Education Days conference in Utrecht Finnish blogger Teemu Arina and I sat down for a conversation in the cafeteria. We discussed my talk - which has raised a bit of a storm in the Netherlands - and what we expect to be doing in 20 years. Teemu was kind enough to record my talk, for which I express my thanks. This post lists eight of the reactions - they're in Dutch, which Google doesn't do - but if you go to Babelfish you can eke out a marginal interpretation. I have also posted my response to Paul Kirshner in the other blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Collective Intelligence
RealMedia video (in the age of YouTube, seeing a Realmedia video seems so... quaint) of a discussion of collective intelligence - though I was intrested in the remarks on patterns. "The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals. Related technology might be able to detect depression by examining a person's patterns of socialization." Machines could probably detect depression - and other illnesses - in communications patterns. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Re-Writing for Proseminar
I like student writing, and especially David Wiley's students. Rob Barton asks, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to sue, what is its legal standing?" Kristy Bloxham breathlessly states "Connexions isn't just about creating a collection of bite-sized informational chunks. It's also about fostering a quantum leap in the evolution of literacy - something akin to the development of the first written language or the creation of the printing press" (I don't think the breathless part is bad, I would just rather see it applied to the wider field of e-learning, rather than to a specific product like Connexions). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School Textbooks Rife with Errors, Tentatively Approved
Remember how people were questioning whether Wikipedia is accurate enough for students to use? "Proposed math books for elementary school children and their teachers have resulted in one computation that publishers would just as soon erase - 109,263. That's the number of errors that were uncovered in proposed math textbooks that are under review by the State Board of Education for distribution to schools in the fall of 2008." Oy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Addicted to Audio?
Here are some interesting thoughts:
Visuals + audio = persuasion
Text + silence = learner control
Narration narrows cultural appeal
Cathy Moore adds: 'Also, narration puts a cultural stamp on your materials. A Flash that could be global gets a blatant 'Made in America' label when I narrate it." I still remember the 'learn Spanish' CD I bought once. It sounded like an Atlanta baseball game. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Zwolle
On the way to Groningen I had tgo change trains at Zwolle. I was just walking through some houses, turned around a corner, and saw this...

Click the link for a shot from Groningen. Stephen Downes, Flickr November 16, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Should I Stay Or...
It's sort of odd to think of a vocabulary test as posing a moment of truth for a blogger, but that seems to be what happened to Miguel Guhlin as on the one hand the blog readability test ranked his writing as 'elementary school' level while in the same post he offers a survey asking whether he should continue blogging. Posting http://www.downes.ca into the reading level meter suggests that it is written at 'genius level' - but if you find that a bit much, you can rest easy knowing that OLDaily.htm comes in at 'high school level. More...