By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Martin LaMonica: Small Company Makes Big Claims on XML Patents, ZD Net October 28, 2005

In a claim that strikes me as pretty ridiculous, a small company is claiming to have patented XML and is now seeking royalties on the widely used encoding language. The patents date from 1997. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CJ: Lemmings and Similar Phenomena, CJs October 25, 2005

I am in b road sympathy with this post, though I would probably have worded it very differently. The language is inflammatory, the points telling. For example: "With Secondary schooling we have a system which, in my view, is increasingly difficult to justify. It is a form of what might be called organised child abuse which repeats itself over and over again, year in, year out". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Albert Ip: Parkin Space: Who Says Learning Should be Fun?, Random Walk in E-Learning October 25, 2005

Godfrey Parkin seeks to poke some holes in recent educational theory: "Engagement is intense mental absorption; interactivity is often just busyness or sugar-coating." Well, sure, intently reading a book or a technical manual is of more pedagogical value than idle chit-chat or time-filling ice-breaking activities. But that merely makes the observation that not all interaction is equal. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. David Merrill: Hypothesized Performance on Complex Tasks as a Function of Scaled Instructional Strategies, IT Forum October 21, 2005

I really hated the title and wasn't expecting much as a consequence, but this turns out to be a pretty good paper, readable, informative and insightful. David Merrill's quest is for "an integrated body of research that supports... interrelated principles (of learning) as a whole," where the principles consist of five major categories: demonstration, application, task-centered, activation and integration. Whether this works as a taxonomy is open to debate (and I would argue there is some cross-categorization at work here). Still, from these principles Merril advances a set of hypothesized performance inprovements based on testing with specific learning outcomes in complex tasks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Doug Kaye: Pop!Tech Day One, Blogarithms October 21, 2005

If you're at the EDUCAUSE conference you're missing Pop!Tech, which is also on right now. No worry, you can access the live feed by following this link. If you're at neither - well - never have people who are not at conferences been able to share in so much. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jay Rosen: Andrew Heyward: The Era of Omniscience is Over, PressThink October 19, 2005

A fascinating admission from the president of NBC on the nature of truth. "We have to abandon any claim to omniscience. Walter Cronkite used to end his broadcast with 'That’s the way it is.' Dan Rather pulled that back, appropriately, to 'That’s part of our world tonight.' The digital journalist, if he or she were being honest, would say something like 'That’s some of what we did our best to find out today. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wilfred Rubens: A Network of Weblogs as a Community of Practice, Wilfred Rubens TE-learning centrum October 18, 2005

On the one hand, this article makes a good case for treating a network of blogs as a community of practice, observing that while bloggers do not communicate intentionally, while moderaters are not employed, and while they use different platforms, they nonetheless form a community, as evidenced by this diagram. More...