By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Where Belief is Born
Good, though short, article summarizing work on the foundations of belief and memory. People, it seems to me, have this folk-psychological view of beliefs and memories as static, sentence-like, off-or-on. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Identity Gang
Link to discussion and resources produced by the clique at Berkman. You'll find some good stuff here, including a link to Kim Cameron's famous Laws of Identity paper, LID, identity commons, and more. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Have Been Told I Can't Talk to Students
Steve Sloan reports, "I have been told (by my boss) that I can't talk to students on my podcasts." Student Ryan Sholin, who appeared in one of Sloan's podcasts, writes, "I find it completely, 100% ridiculous that any bureaucratically-minded folks at this University would censor what their staff members write in their free time, or what they record, or share with the world." That's pretty much my feeling too. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Rights? Whose Digital Rights?
Derek Morrison learns a valuable lesson about DRM before it costs him too much: never, ever buy DRM-enabled hardware or content. Morrison reports, "This device is making the assumption that all MP3 files are rights-protected music and so I've lost the right to do with my non-rights-protected data what I like." More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Advertising Invades Textbooks
David Bollier gets to the heart of the problem: "I can hardly wait until Microsoft starts advertising in computer science textbooks; Ford pitches its SUVs in forestry school books; and professors start wearing corporate logos on their herringbone jackets like tennis stars and Nascar drivers. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Smith, Ragan: Instructional Design, Third Edition
McToonish points to this online support site for a textbook, Smith and Ragan's Instructional Design, Third Edition. Normally I am sceptical about such sites, and about instructional sdesign texts in particular, but the full set of presentations and illustrations from the book alone make a visit worth while. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Building a Proper Shared Syndication Feed Foundation
Orchard could be describing word for word my own need: "Once I’ve acquired feed data, I need to store it in some form usable by my other programs and by some method as agnostic as possible toward the actual contents of the feed." The rest of the post analyzes four approaches: fine-grained relational DB tables, triples in an RDF store, XML database storage and coarse-grained persistence. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web Content by and for the Masses
The New York Times discovers Web 2.0 - "From photo- and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way." It's not just Yahoo! and it's not just online journalism - it will reach right into your online course and turn it inside out. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Web 2.0
Yahoo! is beta-testing the closest thing to the semantic social network I've seen so far with My Web 2.0, which is a combination social networking and content sharing site. It also incluides tagging (which I think is what Yahoo! really wanted with Flickr). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Patent Absurdity
This is a good explanation of why software patents, as currently employed in the U.S. and as proposed (repeatedly) for Europe, are such a bad idea. Consider what would happen if they applied to novels. Instead of protecting specific text, the patent would protect, say, "the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankin." More...
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