By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Val Ross[Edit][Delete]: Who's killing Death By Popcorn?, Globe and Mail [Edit][Delete] July 6, 2006
The Globe and Mail website has a nice new refreshing design (I really like it) and appears to have abandoned the mandatory registration policy I complained so bitterly about. Readers must still pay for some content, though I think the newspaper overestimates the value of its own opinions (as do most people). So I can start linking to the paper again, albeit cautiously. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Norm Friesen[Edit][Delete]: Communication Genres and the Mediatic Turn, Ipseity [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
I confess, my first reaction when I read the abstract of a new paper by Norm Friesen is usually, "oh, neat." So it is with this draft, in which he argues that it is increasingly important to employ mediatic terms - such as culture, genre, audience, or convention - when characterizing learning resources. I think he makes his case, but I'm not sure that his use of Altman's account of epistolarity is the way to go; I would have preferred to use more common and useful terms such as 'bridging', 'confessional' or 'reciprocal' forms of communication. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Steve Lee[Edit][Delete]: Freedback - a Way to Blog Product Feedback, Steve Lee : Weblog [Edit][Delete] July 3, 2006
This is a neat idea. Simply, include the phrase 'freedbacking product' in your post, where 'product' is the name of the product you want to review. Aggregators can then collect the resulting posts. Of course, right away we see people will use the term 'freedback' instead of 'freedbacking', which is no major problem. No, the major problem, of course, is 'freedback spam' (that's my contribution to the net lexicon for today). Or fake freedback ('phreedback' - ok, that's another lexicon item). But freedbacks from a social network or selected list of feeds (as in Edu_RSS) would be pretty handy and spam-free. Also: why restrict your freedback to products. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Konrad Glogowski[Edit][Delete]: Progressive Discourse, Blog of Proximal Development [Edit][Delete] June 30, 2006
A compelling account of how blogging in a classroom setting took students beyond mere learning. "That's when I realized that this class community was truly engaged, that its members were interested in pursuing knowledge as researchers who are passionately involved and not as students who need to absorb the content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: SmartBrief, June 30, 2006
So what might OLDaily look like if it were a commercial publication. Tze was good enough to send me this link to a product called a SmartBrief, and in particular, the SmartBrief offered by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) - here's the direct link, though it may cease functioning in the future (coded URLs tend to do that).
What you'll notice first is how nice it looks. The professionally designed piece uses a standard red black and white colour combo with a nice readable Arial text. Next, you'll see the many advertisements that accompany the issue - ads from private universities, publishers, and software vendors. And finally, you'll see the risk-free content culled from newspapers and magazines. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens[Edit][Delete]: Knowing Before Doing?, Connectivism Blog [Edit][Delete] June 30, 2006
George Siemens observes, "The desire to control and manage communities... [is] at odds with how things need to happen for online spaces to prosper." Quite right. People always seems to feel they need to manage the outcome, even if they don't know what it is they are managing or what outcome they desire. "Instead of trying to force these tools into organizational structures, let them exist for a while. See what happens. Don't decide the entire solution in advance. See the process as more of a dance than a structured enactment of a solution". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Cormier[Edit][Delete]: At the Risk of Disagreeing With Jay Rosen..., June 29, 2006
Reacting to the Jay Rosen article linked here yesterday, Dave Cormier cautions that "there will be a rebuttall, and it will not be televised. It will be subtle. People will be bought out." Count on it. History is not inevitable. "If change is going to happen, everyone needs to be emancipated. Emancipation, in the sense of empowerement to publish, to have voice, to be able to control your destiny, is a very, very long way off. The revolution, if there is ever to be one, is going to take years of concerted effort." Quite right. It already has. More...