mezzoblue:- Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said:

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- If today I were a young man with a hacker mentality, I'd be cooking up biotech in my garage. If I had a garage, that it. Tomorrow's Microsoft or Apple probably exists as just such a lab today, two or three people with an idea and an incubator. There's already a whole literature on do-it-yourself biotech. It's funny to see the reaction from the mainstream as almost exactly what we saw in the 1980s - in this video, even though utterly nothing happened, dig the full environmental suits, the drawn...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The connectivist answer to questions like, "when will I ever use this again?" is to focus on process, not content. Doug Peterson describes his experience, "Later on, there was a response by Colin Jagoe to Peter's original post "When will I use this again?". I answered, "Never, but that's not the point, you're working your brain to make it better able to solve problems that you WILL encounter later on." I love it and says so much." This is just the sort of story I told in my presentation today. But to use this kind of story, you have to talk to students about how they learn. They need to know why they are practising. It's no Karate Kid. You can't just make them do menial tasks with no understanding and...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Oooo - George Siemens makes the leap from connectivism in learning to connective social organization. "What would a world of learning look like if it were based on a granular unit of change – like connections – instead of large impenetrable concept like 'accountability', 'school reform'. How can we structure educational reform in such a manner that anyone can participate?" Right. This is a model of distributed government - a shift from large, powerful, mass-based centralized institutions to government that is small, local and distributed, in which they, and the people that make them up, interact in an open and global communication and decision network (note that 'government as...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- This list of apps that support learning on the iPhone is worth reading on its own merits. I wouldn't recommend for learning a closed platform like the iPhone, but the sort of things you can do with this set of applications described the sort of support environment you want to develop in order to enable mobile learning. In particular, appls like Bento, a personal database application, have a lot going for them. Brent Schlenker, Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development, March 12, 2010 [Tags: Privacy Issues,

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Ben Werdmuller nails what social networks will have to do to replace email. "Email has succeeded because it's open, standard and decentralized; for social networks to replace it, they must also be open, standard and decentralized." He continues, "For social communications to be as popular and ubiquitous as email, there must be one social web, and it must be owned by nobody. That means that each socially-aware site or application must implement the same social communication standards. If you look at HTTP (the protocol that the web relies on), SMTP (one of the protocols behind email) and file formats like RSS and HTML, the common thread behind them is that they're simple." This is exactly right. Ben Werdmuller, The Internet is...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Good article describing the benefits of social networks to improve writing skills. Angela Pascopella and Will Richardson quote a teacher, Paul Allison: "My students are writing things that they are passionate about and willing to stick with and do research on and talk to other students about," he says. For example, one of his students wrote a blog post about abolishing school uniforms. "I don't think he would have written it if he wrote for the school newspaper. So it's like quasi-school. But it's what he wants to write about. And he'll get responses from kids in Boston and Utah." Via Miguel Guhlin, who links and authors a quality set of...

mezzoblue:- You probably experience this on a regular basis: a client sends you an illustration or a logo they'd like to use in a project, but it's a low-res bitmap or a flat image file with a background texture. Or both, if you're really lucky. Sure, you can try and ask for a vector version, but more often than not what they originally sent was the best copy they had on hand.

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Twitter is becoming a news feed service, where people follow celebrities, and not a social network. This according to this article in CNN. "In fact, a whopping 73% of Twitter accounts have tweeted fewer than 10 times according to a new report from Barracuda Networks, a Web security company." Julianne Pepitone, CNN, March 12, 2010 [Tags: Twitter, Networks, Security Issues] [Link] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- [Audio] This short talk summarizes the pedagogical model of personal learning that to me underlies the design of connectivist learning network methodologies. The presentation itself echoes some recent themes, while the questions took me into some very new ground reflecting on the learning experience itself. Part of the Networked Connectivism, Distributed cognition and PLNS panel at the Virtural Worlds Best Practices in Education conference hosted by Beth Davies (SL name: Michigan Paul). Moderator: LoriVonne Lustre. No slides; audio only. 3rd Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference, Second Life (Keynote) March 12, 2010 [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- As son as I saw the first web application building 'mistake' I knew I should link to this post. The mistake? "Not thinking about character encoding right from the start." All I can say is, ack! ack! ack! (I hate character encoding issues). Another good one is number 10: "Underestimating the problem of spam." Juliette Culver, Weblog, March 11, 2010 [Tags: Spam] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Antonio (no last name on this blog) offers a responds and reframing of recent criticisms of Moodle. He's concerned abut the critics implicitly helping competitors, like Blackboard. And the criticisms, he says, miss the point. "It's not Moodle which cost 6 million British Pounds. Moodle was free, had they deemed to stick just with it. Then, I have no clear info that the OU has repented its decision." Antonio, Skate of the Web, March 11, 2010 [Tags: Great Britain, Blackboard Inc., Web Logs] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Keeping you up to date: there are now 135 million Creative Commons licensed images in Flickr. Of these, the large majority (73 percent) have a Creative Commons 'non-commercial' license (CC-NC). Interestingly, there's a clear bias in this post for non-CC-NC licenses - a so-called "freedom score" increases the fgewer CC-NC licenses there are. I'll say it again: a resource is MORE FREE if it is NOT sold commercially, because the owners of these resources won't let you have them unless you pay them money. It is an Orwellian turn of phrase that allows you to portray as "more free" resources that you have to pay for. Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, March 11, 2010 [Tags:

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- One would think that organizations and companies that support vouchers would use them themselves, instead of relying, as they all do, on directed or in-house training. Until now, looking for a company that actually did this would be futile. But according to this article, Microsoft is offering free online learning to customers in the form of vouchers. This program, offering 18,500 vouchers, is a very small-scale experiment in the system. But it will be interesting to see how the pilot works. If so, it could then be scaled to serve the corporate community generally. It would be good to have a working example of such a program before converting the entire public education system to it, as voucher advocates urge. Tom Abate, San...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Can people educate themselves? The jury's still out, I think, on this. But these five autodidact sites suggest that, maybe, they can. Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn, March 10, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The emphasis we place on a single word in a sentence can change the whole meaning of the sentence. This is because the meaning is based, in part, on the alternatives excluded by the sentence, snd these are contextually bound and indicated by emphasis. That's (one reason) why we say meaning is not contained solely in the sentence itself, but is distributed across an environment. This post is intended to be a cautionary note abut social media, but extends to the use of text generally. That's why I'll often indicate emphasis in posts, with either italics or *stars*. Steve Borsch, Connecting the Dots, March 10, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link]...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Just for fun, I have posted a bunch of screenshots from one of my earliest web sites, from 1995. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 10, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- In this article, a forward for a forthcoming book, I look at the relation between control and software. Web and learning applications, I write, look like language, with all its attendant expressiveness and freedom, but functions like architecture, which can be cold and inflexible. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 10, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

mezzoblue:- While it's been a fairly quiet summer around these parts, that doesn't necessarily mean I've been slacking off. Let's run down the list.

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- David Wiley points to the new US $500m OER initiative and notes they will be free for commercial reuse. "We now know that the resources created under the AGI funding will either be licensed CC BY or placed in the public domain. We know this because no CC licenses with SA or NC clauses live up to the promises made in the above statements. And the GFDL has been relegated to the realm of the OPL." Well, we'll see how this works out. The U.S. can provide content infrastructure (I agree with Wiley on this point, that content is infrastructure) free to citizens and corporations if it wants; we'll see how it reacts to what will be the natural impulse of the corporations to block access to the free stuff. David Wiley, iterating toward...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The standard for online courses, we are told, is firmly in place. Mark Guzdial protests. "Surely, this can't be it - it can't be that Sakai + Twitter + a blog or Wiki is what all future studies will call the 'traditional' form of online courses? What about amazingly and powerful collaborative spaces like Kansas, and provably better ways of teaching with technology like cognitive tutors Surely we can do better than what's being used today? It's that second step that's more promising. We can do much better than...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Is standardisation of curriculum 'an (un)stable and precarious achievement'? It is disquieting, writes Artichoke, "that after reading Edwards this seems increasingly likely." These reflections are based on a reading of Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Some good stuff here, like this: "innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine." Artichoke considers this in turn with respect to Richard Edwards Translating the Prescribed into...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The meaning of a word, for Derrida, is in part defined by the alternatives it excludes. (See p. 89, here). What was the range of choices from which one could have selected? We see this explicitly in this model of Google Suggest. What questions can we ask, and what questions are excluded? What do you suggest represents this relationship visually, and interestingly, shows how by reforming language Google Suggest reforms what we can imagine. Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Google] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- I've heard this from a couple sources, that Moodle is becoming a mish-mash of conflicting technologies. This, I think, is the inevitable outcome of the module-based approach that has come to characterize open source software (and a reason why such an approach doesn't appeal to me). Donald Clark talks about the various offshoots, including Open University's pilot, which he calls a "dead end", and Kineo's commercialization. He suggests that its constructivist intentions are "a lot of rot", not implemented in practise, and "a utopian dream". Donald Clark, Plan B, March 9, 2010 [Tags: Open Source,

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Let me begin the week with this uplifting post from Dave Pollard. "When much of your life is tied up with work (collaborative or hierarchical) and the schedules and priorities of others, most decisions are made for you, or at least restricted by the constraints of society. It is a bit startling to realize that, suddenly, almost every decision I face is mine alone to make. Each decision may have repercussions for others, which I of course have to think about, but ultimately my decisions are now driven by principles, not by accommodation." What are these principles, he asks? Being generous, valuing time, and living naturally. Dave Pollard, How To Save The World, March 8, 2010 [Tags: none] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Norm Friesen previews a book, "DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education" by Anya Kamenetz. We both received email this week from the publisher announcing the forthcoming release and noting "Dr. Friesen and you are briefly noted within the text, based on a session that the author attended at UBC." In fact, I was interviewed for the book by the author in January, 2009, and as I reported to our own public affairs people, "The interview focused mostly on models of learning for the future - I talked about the idea of personal learning, the idea that assessment will be dis-aggregated, and that credentials would be granted from...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- If higher education were like an organism that evolved, what would it look like? Probably nothing like this mixed-metaphor formulation: "the pendulum swing(s) faster between proprietary integration and open modulation to accelerate the clock speed for more effective and efficient knowledge creation and distribution?" Evolution isn't teleological; it isn't based on the imperative to "adapt or die". Rather, evolution is more a process of mixing an multiplying, aided by random mutations. If the environment stays the same, most mutations fail; if the environment changes, new mutations multiply rapidly to fill the new niche. In higher education, evolution would be aided by creating a lifecycle of things that grow, flourish,...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- "The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo," writes David Gelernter, "but now it's time to start making the internet do what we want it to do." What the internet brings to the table, he writes, is a sense of "now" that we didn't have before - we know what people are doing now, we know what the price of aluminum is now, the weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. But we should refine this into a more complete mastery of time, to enable more reflective, deeper analysis of trends past and future. Scott Leslie, who sent me the link by email, asks, how much of this do we want to program into our machines? We don't want it to do our thinking for us, I think, but it should help us to newer,...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- George Siemens and I have something in common: a background in the restaurant industry. That's just one tidbit from this wide-ranging interview available on video by Ulrike Reinhard. Siemens emerges as a thoughtful and articulate advocate of personalized learning and social networks. Of most interest to me, of course, is his discussion of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course we taught starting in 2008. But the key question is found in the title of the post, addressing how the education system can become decentralized. Ulrike Reinhard, Conversations At the Beginning of a New Time, March 8, 2010 [Tags: Personalization,

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- A longish article in last Tuesday's New York Times argues that great teaching can be taught. The basis for this proposition is a study by a former teacher named Doug Lemov who, we are told, conducted a study of the techniques used by successful teachers (as determined, in part, by standardized test scores). The advice, summed up as the eponymous "Lemov Taxonomy", a non-school of thought (I found zero scholarly references to it) that incorporates unsurprising techniques to hold the attention of students and to give them clear directions. Even supposing this produces...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- With all the talk of the "death of the VLE" one might wonder what Blackboard thinks about it. Wonder no more, as Blackboard's platform evangelist delivers a long and wide-ranging post defending the VLE in general and the company in particular. The post deserves more attention than I can give it in this short space. John Fontaine talks about the drivers for change - what features should count as core, the need for lower-cost systems, the desire to leverage emergent knowledge in a network. He responds to criticisms about the VLE's inflexibility and hegemony. Drawing on research into ten years of...

mezzoblue:- Currently one of the biggest stumbling blocks to embedded type on the web is of a legal nature rather than any genuine technological barrier. Most of the major browsers have now implemented the @font-face property, and between sIFR and Cufón there are also alternatives for providing non-standard typefaces to browsers that haven’t caught up yet.

mezzoblue:- I've been using Cufón off and on since writing about font embedding back in May. It's a great hack, but browser progress since that time has been making me feel that the native CSS @font-face rule is becoming increasingly viable. Or, at least enough so that it seems like it's time to start dabbling.

mezzoblue:- I've spent a bit of time playing around with HTML5's canvas element lately. It's a fun new toy and has a lot of potential to be useful. But the biggest headache I'm finding so far is the lack of authoring tools.

mezzoblue:- For no particular reason, I present to you a list of things that were true on August 27, 2001:

D'Arcy Norman dot net:- I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great [...]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Following Forterra and Metaplace, another 3D environment, There, is shutting its virtual doors. "There has closed registration, billing, and member program upgrades. Also, developer submissions are closed and rental processing will be stopped, so no more rent will be collected for neighborhoods, lots, or There homes. And, all purchases of Therebucks and member program updates... will be refunded in full." If Second Life can survive the downturn, it'll be in a good place. Karl Kapp, Kapp Notes, March 3, 2010 [Tags: Second Life] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Open Courseware Consortium president Steve Carson responds to David Wiley's post. Included is a link to the orgqanization's strategic plan Call me jaded, but I don't think Wiley's opinion has changed - he posts the Value Proposition to Members" on his blog without comment (just to put things in perspective - for one year's worth of OCWC's $1 million annual budget I could produce OLDaily indefinitely into the future, until I died, by living off the interest (p.s. anybody willing to give me $1 million to do that should feel free to write)). David Wiley, iterating toward openness, March 3, 2010 [Tags:

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- I agree that we can't ever say "conclusively" about such a study, but games do influence attitudes. "But there's no point in being naive about it: experiences and activities influence our views, thoughts, and beliefs (duh). Even the US Army recognizes the value of games in developing skills (mindsets?) of future soldiers." George Siemens, elearnspace, March 3, 2010 [Tags: Video, Experience] [Link] [

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- The Winnipeg Free Press - never a bastion of enlightenment - is calling for tuition increases. "Manitoba students have had it easy for too long for no real purpose other than political" it argues in an editorial. "Low tuition has not opened the post-secondary doors to low-income families." Maybe not - low-income families have many barriers to face that are not addressed by lower fees. But raising tuition fees surely slams the door on any lower-income students that make it that far. Raising fees entrenches higher education as a bastion of privilege for the wealthier set, and devalues academic merit as the criterion for admission. The newspaper should recommend redressing tuition 'shortfalls' with compensating public funding, and...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- A major European report on open educational resources recommends the adoption of competency-based learning. "This report emphasises the need to foster open practices of teaching and learning that are informed by a competency-based educational framework." (p.12) I can see the reasoning: OER's enable autonomous learning, but only if learning is evaluated in terms of outcomes, not process. "The learner's autonomy, personal mastery and self-direction must be acknowledged." (p.39) This also opens learning to more providers, something explicitly embraced by the report: policy makers and funding bodies, they write, should "demand public–private partnerships to concentrate on ventures for innovating educational practices and...

D'Arcy Norman dot net:- it’s consistently the most interesting, varied, relevant, and mind-opening conference. go. register. now. even better – there’s still time to submit a proposal for a session. I’m going. May in Vancouver? What could be better than that?

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Already missing Training Magazine? You wouldn't be if you were reading this newsletter - or any of the other eight nine alternatives suggested by Karl Kapp. Kark Kapp, Kapp Notes, March 2, 2010 [Tags: Information, Newsletters] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- David Wiley is wondering whether the Open CourseWare Consortium is good value for money. It just raised $350K from contributing universities. "I have to continue to ask myself... If the hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on determining a governance structure, drawing up incorporation documents, establishing a board of directors and traveling to board meetings, forming subcommittees, setting definitions (that exclude projects like Connexions), etc., had instead been spent on publishing more OER, wouldn't the world be a better place?" David Wiley, iterating toward openness, March 2, 2010 [Tags:

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- "Social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box." So notes Harold Jarche, who sees this as the next six-figure grab by enterprise software vendors. "Perhaps PT Barnum was right," he says, "and there is an innate desire to buy some magic potion to solve all our problems. Why are businesses buying their productivity tools from traveling circuses?" Jay Cross comments, "I watched vendors hi-jack the term eLearning, and I don't want to see it happen to social or informal learning." Jane Hart also...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Creative Commons is generating an "Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations." In this post Alex Kozak asks for contributions. "We'd like to continue supporting this database to help researchers, advocates, and learners find educational projects, analyze trends in online education, and become more effective advocates for open education." Alex Kozak, Creative Commons, March 2, 2010 [Tags: Online Learning, Research, Project Based...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- This is a very interesting project, a service that will test your repository implementation. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first (at least it was for me) but basically you give it the URL of the services you want to test and the list of files you want to test it with, and it will act like a user, executing the services, and will return a bunch of metrics. "Each of your selected input files will be passed through the services you have selected and a variety of service and server-level statistics that can be automatically measured will be logged in the system." [ref] Which is a great idea, really. The...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Here's an interesting thought: "If you understand an idea, you can implement it in software." Is this true? If so, we would also have to assert: all ideas can be implemented in software. Which seems false on the face of it ('growing wheat' would be an obvious counterexample) unless you allow the implementation to be a simulation. The way to make sense of the assertion is to think of writing software as a form of writing. And mathematics as a form of writing. The expressive, combined with the syntactical and the grammatical. So, is the thought then true? "If you understand an idea, you can implement it in software, write it, or describe it mathematically." Is it even still the same question? Daniel Lemire, Weblog, March 2, 2010...

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- Quick post outlining a resurgent interest in educational metadata standards. The planets must be aligned just so, because there has been work in Dublic Core, IEEE-LOM, and ISO Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR). Irvin Flack, e-learning standards, March 2, 2010 [Tags: Metadata] [Link] [Comment]

Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily:- So what are your options when presenting in Second Life? This is particularly relevant because I'll be presenting briefly at a conference in Second Life next week. If not the usual PowerPoint slides - which Alan Levine feels is "perversely wrong" - then what? Audio only? Really, that's the only practical alternative - it takes me maybe 15 minutes or so to make a slide, but would take days to create the equivalent 3D representation. Audio I can handle - but yeah, you need "that great FM radio voice." Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, March 2, 2010 [Tags: Audio,