By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OneDayBlogSilence
Some people have started a campaign to have one day of blog silence April 30 to mark the Virginia Tech shootings. I don't intend to take part. The editorial in today's Globe and Mail explains my reasoning quite nicely: "How common are school-based shootings in the United States? Between 1994 and 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta documented 220 separate incidents, accounting for 253 deaths. Leaving aside summer and holidays, that's nearly one homicidal incident a week over six years at schools". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. In a World of iPods, Will the CD Go the Way of Vinyl?
The same story about CDs is the one we used to hear about books all the time. You know, the need for an archive, the need for the physical feel of a book, that sort of thing. The other side is that the market for CDs is falling through the basement, and while there remains a market, it is increasingly one for nostalgia buffs only. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Participative Web: User Created Content
"This study describes the rapid growth of [User Created Content], its increasing role in worldwide communication and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are associated challenges? Is there a government role and what form could it take?" Longish PDF. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ingredients of the Future of Learning
Judy Breck points to an article from Bruno Giussani talking about the future of journalism. The point is that educators "will need to reinvent themselves as a skilled part of a crowd rather than as lecturers, to become more tolerant of ambiguity, to become fluent in both the tech innovations and the shifts in social dynamics that are driving the development of media. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PLEase
I guess the concept of the personal learning environment "began crossing the chasm into the mainstream" of the corporate e-learning community last week. there may be a land rush shortly, but for now the discussion has mostly been of the head-scratching and visioning variety. Citing some workshops with Harold Jarche and Judy Brown last year, Jay Cross suggests that the best starting point was what we were calling Personal Knowledge Management. meanwhile, Tony karrer responds to my concern that the corporate world is more interested in command and control. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interoperability In the New Digital Identity Infrastructure
Scott Leslie sends this paper over, commenting that it might muddy, rather than clarify, the identity waters. He's right, as the author brings in the whole 'card-space' approach to identity into the picture and suggests that the identity infrastructure will need to accommodate those as well as the simpler (and more functional) OpenID-type specifications. The identity space could become complex in a hurry (which of course suits the big companies well). Overall, an informed discussion, but the problem should not be characterized as a 'tragedy of the commons' but rather, unless we can keep companies from carving it up among themselves, a problem of 'theft of the commons' - a far more common, and tragic, scenario. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Psiphon - Creating Cracks in the Great Firewall
Not sure I've mentioned this before, but it's worth pointing to this application that helps you see content through firewalls - whether the great firewalls that surround entire nations or the little firewalls that surround schools. Just remember if you use it that very little of what you do online is genuinely anonymous. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. AIMS Fails Learning 101
Just a note to our legislators in New Brunswick, that they should not be listening to the (not so neutral) advice of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, which is recommending standardized testing, and should instead be listening to people who have actually studied education and done some research in the field, who recommend against it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.

by Stephen Downes
April 12, 2007

So It Goes...

1922 - 2007
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., April 12, 2007 [Link]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Conversation at MIT
I spent the day today at MIT where, thanks to the generous welcome offered by Phil Long, I visited OCW and the Media Lab, among other things, and engaged in this conversation with a number of the people at the University. I began describing the properties of successful networks, and from there we wandered through Edu_RSS, topics, tagging, resource profiles and more. I really enjoyed my visit today and, on listening again to the recording, think you'll enjoy this recording. The link is to the MP3 file. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web April 10, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Edu_RSS, RSS, Networks]. More...