By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Coursera composition course
Laura Gibbs, Google+, March 22, 2013
I have said in the past that the xMOOCs like those offered by Coursera will need to become more like connectivist courses over time. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM
Cory Doctorow, The Guardian, March 22, 2013
Cory Doctorow takes Tim Berners-Lee to the woodshed on DRM in web standards. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Adblock Plus Doesn’t Need No Stinking Google Play Store
Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, March 22, 2013
What bothers me is that I was enjoying my new Android phone and gushing over its features, and then Google has to go all anti-competitive what with shutting down Reader, opposing RSS, and of course kicking the very useful Ad Blocker off the play store. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. IndieAuth: Sign in with your domain name
IndieAuth, March 18, 2013
Here we go: "This is an IndieAuth login prompt. To use it, you'll need to:
Read the full setup instructions. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Centralized Collection and Control of Personal Data
Arvind Narayanan, March 18, 2013
Presentation and paper from Air Mozilla on the subject of distributed authentication. "While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers..." The paper argues that decentralized authentication faces difficult hurdles. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes on Your Own Machine
Klint Finley, Wired, March 18, 2013
One of the problems with Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT is that they can turn it off whenever they feel like it - this is what happened to people using IFTTT with twitter recently. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Owns a MOOC?
Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2013
IPR follies and MOOCs. Faculty in California have a hard-won right to own their own academic material. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Machine Readable Rights and the News Industry day 2013
International Press Telecommunications Council, March 21, 2013
The W3C's Phil Archer expresses the dilemma of rights on the web in a nutshell: "Expressing rights statements on the Web is easy. Getting people to listen is hard — what's in it for them?" And this was in essence the question explored at the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) meetings on machine readable rights last week. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How could cMOOCs be designed and incorporated under an institutional framework?
Sui Fai John Mak, Learner Weblog, March 21, 2013
I wrote a brief item a few days ago on evaluating MOOCs. I write: "I then ask whether it satisfied the properties of a successful network. I can do this from two perspectives: first, from a process perspective; and second, from an outcomes perspective. The process perspective asks whether the MOOC satisfied the criteria for successful networks... The outcomes perspective looks at the MOOC as a knowing system." The current post is Sui Fai John Mak's response to my post, where he raises learning contracts. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Aussie Coursera? A new homegrown MOOC platform arrives
Bella Counihan, The Conversation, March 23, 2013
According to this article, "The first Australian free online education platform has been launched in Canberra today, by tertiary education minister Chris Bowen. Open Universities Australia, a private distance and online education organisation, has stepped into the world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with a new online platform called Open2Study." I'm thinking right now that traditional LMSs could have countered this whole trend simply by having an 'open courses' option on their LMSs. More...
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