By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kevin Carey[Edit][Delete]: Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB, Education Sector [Edit][Delete] May 18, 2006
I am a former North American NTN Trivia champion. I played on a team, of course, the Inglewood Collective. Part of our success was due to our knowledge. But a big part of it was due to our ability to understand how to win trivia games. I remember one day winning a 'Raceway Trivia' game - despite knowing nothing about auto racing - by playing probabilities. This is, as educators have long pointed out (I read it first in Holt), what students learn in a lecture and test environment: how to pass the tests. So it should be no surprise to learn that schools, school boards, and now entire states are learning to game the system. More...
Verisign chooses OpenID
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boris Mann[Edit][Delete]: Verisign chooses OpenID, B. Mann Consulting [Edit][Delete] May 18, 2006
Boris Mann is "confused" but I find this to be very good news. OpenID is a system that is very similar to my own mIDm, specifically in that it is a distributed identity system - no centralized registry. Mann suggests, "I would follow this up with support for multiple identity protocols - that is, after all, Canter's Law: work with everything. You could have a single identity hosted by VeriSign and accessible via a variety of protocols, from OpenID to DIX to SAML to InfoCard." But no, you can't, not unless you can get the identity client and the service provider to agree to the same set of protocols. More...