By Stephen Downes
July 22, 2003
OLDaily Back
You may have noticed
lost or delayed editions of OLDaily (and thanks for the
emails). You may have received a previous, abbreviated
edition, explaining the case. The website is mostly working
again and I am once again receiving email through downes.ca
and so it's back to normal - I hope. Please note: if you
sent me email last week or over the weekend it may have
been lost; if I have not responded, it was lost, so please
send me another note. I've pur everything from the last
five days in today's edition; it's not much but it ensures
everybody has the full set of links. Tomorrow I'll try to
catch up on any news I've missed.
Update: well, not quite back... Sendmail is currently
failing... (*sigh*) By Stephen Downes, OLDaily, July 22,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
RSS 2.0 Specification Moves to
Berkman
The big news while OLDaily was shut
down: Dave Winer and Userland have turned over ownership of
the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard's Berkman Center for
Internet & Society. The move was greeted with wide acclaim,
as the specification was immediately licensed under
Creative Commons, which ensures that developers can build
on it without fear of someone (SCO, say) coming along and
claiming royalties. That Winer is also at Harvard is not
overlooked by anyone; nor is his membership as part of a
three person RSS advisory board. And it's not everything I
argued for in RSS-Dev, where I urged that the use of a
syndication standard ought to imply a license to use the
content. But it is a case of Winer 'letting go' which, I
guess, is quite sufficient for one day. Coincidentally (and
on the same day, I think) Harvard Weblogs revised its terms of use policy, addressing concerns
raised in earlier discussion. All in all, a very good
day for Harvard, and one that gladdens my heart. By Dave
Winer, Technology at Harvard Law, July 18, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
This
essay is a bit old, but was and continues to be of
significant importance in my own thought, so it was a
pleasure to see it raised in today's IFETS discussion. The
commentator, Michael Barner-Rasmussen, observes (edited for
grammar), "The very way you pose the question limits the
type of answers you might receive from the literature. Who
is to say, that information (as in bits) and knowledge, as
in remembered behavior-tranforming experiences have any
relevant similarities? The very terms we use to describe
such abstract and ephemeric phenomena often turn out to
bias any 'observations' we subsequently manage." This is
exactly right: the manner in which we express our thoughts
in this, or any, discipline has a direct bearing on the
range of theoretical options available. Now read Peirce:
"The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and
different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes
of action to which they give rise." Here we see the seed of
logical positivism and behaviourism. Yet if we reinterpret
"habit" as something like this, "when the mind is once
inlivened by a present impression, it proceeds to form a
more lively idea of the related objects," (Hume) what we see in Peirce is completely
transformed. By Charles Sanders Peirce, Popular Science
Monthly, January, 1878
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
BeWorldWise
I love stuff like
this. "This web site has been created to allow
schoolchildren and homeschoolers to 'come aboard' the tall
ship Picton Castle as she embarks on her third voyage
around the world. The Picton Castle is the only tall ship
currently engaged in a global circumnavigation. She left
her
home port of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada on June 9, 2003
and will return to Lunenburg in May of 2004, after having
traveled 37,000 miles, and visited 50 ports in 22
countries." Should the Picton Castle need a hand for part
of it's voyage, I'm sure I could make the time...
By Various Authors, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
PILOTed
This month's edition of
PILOT Online Learning Systems's monthly newsletter picks up on the topic
of petterns in e-learning, a topic of interest in these
pages before the, um, break. There are some nice
observations in this short PDF, including a set of nine
aspects to building a pattern around a certain skill. The
author also draws out the concept with a short analysis of
the Amazon navigation bar. By Mitchell Weisburgh, PILOTed,
July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Developing Systems of Online
Payment
This is an interesting approach to
online payments, very similar to what we are developing
here. The idea is that you can purchase a virtual debit
card from this company, Bitpass, and then deduct
micropayments from the card. "When the customer wants to
buy an item on an BitPass-enabled Web site, he or she need
only give an e-mail address and a BitPass password." Nifty
idea, but you must give away your email with each sale, and
if you don't want to deal with BitPass, you're out of luck.
Say it with me: depersonalized, decentralized, distributed.
The three key Ds to DRM. By Bob Tedeschi, New York Times,
July 21, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Swap Songs? You May Be On Record Industry's
Hit List
Reports are coming in from all over
regarding widespread legal actions being undertaken by the
RIAA in its battle against file sharing. This account is
typical. "Online swappers wondering whether their names are
on the record industry's hit list can check online to see
if they're among 871 whose identities were subpoenaed in
the first step of unprecedented mass legal action to stem
Net piracy." The response from critics has been pointed.
"They treat everyone as a copyright infringer, and you're
assumed guilty until proven innocent." One site, www.boycott-riaa.com, is urging readers
to respond by boycotting the RIAA. Another site is blocking access to the
RIAA and MPAA. And the Information War continues. By
Jefferson Graham, USA Today, July 21, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Attack
Update
OK, here's where we stand. I have no
email into or out of downes.ca - this means that if you are
sending me email to stephen@downes.ca it will fail. It also
means that newsletter mailouts are failing (at least, I
think they're failing...). Additionally, all scheduled
processes have terminated, which means that Edu_RSS will be
updated manually. I have no tech support until at least
tomorrow, so it looks like we'll be limping along like this
for a bit. Again, please note, email sent to me at
downes.ca is not reaching me. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's
Web, July 22, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Attack on
Downes.ca
Downes.ca was off the air for a few
days following a denial of service attack. We are back for
now but things are still touch and go. I'll keep you
posted. By Stephen Downes, July 21, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
IMS and OKI, the Wire and the
Socket
Description of progress in MIT's Open
Knowledge Initiative (OKI). It is important to recognize,
reports the author, that OKI is not an open source learning
environment. Nor is it even an architecture, though as the
author note, OKI's layer-cake archietcture has become
famous. Rather, the heart of OKI is a set of "OSIDs:
definitions of particular slots in a computer program. In
an application that allows you to do searches for learning
objects in repositories, for example, the programmer can
just say 'put the code that talks to the repository here'
without actually having to program very much beyond calls
to the list of commands that the OSID specifies." Cool
stuff. Too bad so much of this work is happening behind
closed doors; as the author notes, "the success of OKI
depends almost entirely on the support it gets," and the
more open the process, the more likely the support. By
Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, July 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Government of Canada Newsroom (Phase
II)
Funny how things work. Yesterday I asked a
questions, to which a reader responded and, in passing,
suggested I visit the Canada website. I haven't been there
for a while, so I did, and as I passed the news page, I
sent a suggestion about formatting. I received a prompt
reply which, in passing, mentioned that the Government of
Canada is planning to implement, among other things, RSS
feeds in Phase II of the Newsroom web site. This is
something I have encouraged (and here) for some time, so I asked for
more information. With permission, I have placed a copy of
the fact sheet on my website. "Phase II of the Newsroom
will be launched with a primary focus on a new distribution
strategy for government news and related resources. Phase
II of the Newsroom will give people choices regarding the
types of news that they receive and the technology that
they use to access it." I will of course provide more
information when it becomes publicly available. A French version of the Fact Sheet is also
available. By fact Sheet, Government of Canada, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Adaptive Hypermedia
Yesterday I
linked to a short article about adaptive hypermedia.
Today's link is to a much more thorough examination of the
same subject by the same author, in the form of a Power
Point presentation. Make sure you have a look at this -
even if you are sceptical about adaptive hypermedia you
will want to see the role played by, for example, the public and
private information (PAPI) standard, learning objects,
classification and more. As for me, I'm a lot less
sceptical after reading this presentation. Great stuff. By
Alexandra Cristea, June 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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