By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Overlap of User Communities in Social Networking Sites
This is the first quantification of the social network overlap problem that I've seen. How bad is it? Well, 64 percent of Facebook users also have MySpace accounts. Beyond Facebook and MySpace it drops sharply, with the sole exception of LinkedIn, which draws a lot of Ning and Plaxo users. I wish the survey had also included LiveJournal, which is often (inexplicably) left out of these social network comparisons, despite its millions of socially networked users. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
The new Journal of Computer Mediated Communication is out, featuring articles on social networking, with danah boyd and Nicole Ellison guest-editing. The pair also team up to write an introduction that defines 'social network sites' ("as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system"), gives a history (with a good timeline), and then outlines the scholarship. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Making a Difference
'Free Rice' is a program that gives rice to the U.N. World Food Program people if you define words for them. Get the word right and you successfully donate ten grains of rice. If you're wondering how much rice that is, it's less than a spoonful. Which makes me ask, how much does rice cost? If you define words for a full hour, how much worth of rice have you donated? Well if you want to know about rice you go to rice online, which puts it between $350 to $450 per metric tonne, bagged, depending on the quality of the rice and where you buy it. According to Brett Jordan (who appears to have looked it up) 1000 grains of rice makes 26 grams. That gives each grain of rice a value of less than one one-hundredth of a cent (obviously it costs more if you buy it at Safeway, but the U.N. doesn't buy it at Safeway). So if you define one word, you have earned less than a tenth of a cent. At that rate, if you manage to define 100 words in an hour, you will have contributed 10 cents to poor people. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. American (Perhaps North American) Kids Are Not Even Close
SETDA and ISTE have released a report outlining what they thing students should learn and how technology should help them learn it (they say it's "a shared vision of a 21st century education system," which means it isn't shared at all, but they'd like it to be). T.H.E. has a summary. What I found interesting in the report is that the core subjects, even when supplemented by four "21st century themes", amount to less than half what needs to be learned. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Religious Wars
Clive Shepherd may refer to my contribution to SURF Education days as part of a "religious war", but I would point out that it's only a religious war to the side that's got religion. "I don't feel under any pressure to take a position on one educational approach or another," writes Shepherd. "Am I missing something?" Well yes, Clive, you are. And that is, the discipline of educational technology is not - or at least, it should not be - a matter of faith. What really bothered me about the paper I criticized was the poor reasoning and the poor understanding of science. Apparently some people think I was being therefore unreasonable and unfair. Yes, many teachers - including Clive Shepherd, apparently - govern their classes according to what they want (and pretend it's the value-free neutral ground that they're taking), where what they want is informed by superstition and myth (left-brain right-brain indeed). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pathfinder Journeys Now Available
Derek Morrison points to the release of these descriptions and reflections of the 'Pathfinder' projects undertaken at various UK universities. The packages are zip files, which will need to be unpackaged. projects include the Design of the ADELIE Framework for Intervention, at Leicester, and the CABLE Project (for Academy Subject Centre: Health and Sciences Practice) at Hertfordshire. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PLEs and the Institution
The core of this post is in the diagram (which is Scott Wilson's), which takes a very institution-centric view of the personal-learning environment. My own feeling is that as PLEs become mainstream institutions can reassess whether a course-centric mode of delivery is the most appropriate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. More Bogus Percentages. This Time On Wikipedia
It is worth reporting (since this newsletter has a reasonably wide readership) once again that the famous 'cone of experience' is a hoax. I've seen it debunked in several places, and on several mailing lists, over the years. But still it persists - it shows up in academic papers, education guru seminars, and now, most recently, on Wikipedia. Showing, I guess, that nothing is immune. Anyhow, Will Thalheimer has a good set of links showing where it appears and, if you scroll down, giving it a thorough debunking. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. JISC CETIS
CETIS has launched a new web page design, a very nice clean look with news and blog posts (and an RSS feed, naturally). The site gives much better access to articles like this one on ontologies and use cases. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Attention Profiling: APML Beginner's Guide
Personal attention metadata is "...consolidated, structured descriptions of people's interests and dislikes. The information about your interests and how much each means to you (ranking) is stored in a way so that computers and web-based services can easily read it, interpret it, process it and pass it on should you request and permit them to do so." It is what I have called "second party metadata", that is, metadata created by the user of a resource. As this article shows, we are now entering a period where this is becoming more important. More...