By Stephen Downes
May 17, 2004
Freedom 0
Movable Type has
launched version 3.0 of its blogging software and is
getting a bit of a rough ride from the blogging community.
Chief among their concerns is its new pricing policy, which
as Mark Pilgrim reports in this item, may result in people
paying hundreds of dollars to maintain their blogs. Writes
Pilgrim, "Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me
right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run
the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of
freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and
every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer
freedoms." Six Apart, which makes Movable Type, offered
this clarification of its licensing, but
Pilgrim's point holds. Moreover, it appears that 3.0 isn't
the upgrade everyone hoped it would be: Alan Levine writes, "It is not like any
of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and
earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5
minutes, Mr. Phelps." Anyhow, bloggers are abandoning
Movable Type and heading to WordPress, a type of open source blogging
software that will never change its rules or suddenly cost
hundreds of dollars. By Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Mark, May
14, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Science.gov 2.0 Launches
This new
version of the governmentwide Web portal for science and
technology information is a significant improvement over
the first. Still a federated search (which means searches
may take, as the site says, 'up to 30 seconds'), the site
has an improved search engine and now accesses 30 resource
portals and 47 million pages in real time. It's not
perfect, though: when I searched for 'Downes' (as I always
do with services such as this) it decided that I was
searching for 'down' and, of course, returned hundreds of
useless results. I also think that the site is nearing the
limit of what can be done with a federated search system,
and don't expect that, with wide usage, it will be able to
maintain its 30 second target. By Sara Michael, FCW.com,
May 12, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Education Arcade
From Water Cooler
Games (via WWWEDU), an interesting blog in itself, comes
coverage of the two-day Education Arcade, a conference at
MIT held to discuss the use of games in learning. Some good
- and sometimes controversial - content here, such as this,
from Brenda Laurel: "Laurel argued that the teaching of
hierarchy is the primary function of public education in
America -- designed to create an efficient underclass (even
if there's not a conspiracy to do so). School trains kids
to be good workers and buyers, which is, in Laurel's
opinion, bad news." Coverage from Day One and Day Two. By Ian Bogost, Water Cooler
Games, May 13, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Ignou Makes Mark Worldwide in Distant
Learning
You might be hearing more about Ignou
(the Indira Gandhi National Open University) as time goes
by. As this article notes, the university "has taken the
world of academic sphere by storm... With expansion in 26
nations, including the Commonwealth ones, the University by
far has touched all continents and has become an Indian
symbol in open and distance education." Via ADL Co-Lab News
Report. By Surojit Mahalanobis, The Times of India, May 10,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Relevancy
One of my little pet
peeves is that 'relevancy' is not a word, or at least, not
a word that should be used - the proper word to use is
'relevance'. That said, Lisa Galarneau wrote to me to
inform of her new blog, Relevancy, which looks at "things
that promote relevancy, including recommender systems
(under the category relevancy apps)." Included in her note
was this link to a paper about her
experiences working at Towerrecords.com and about a faceted
classification system called Endeca. By Lisa Galarneau, Relevancy,
May, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Semio-grads
Nice article with
(of course) hidden layers of meaning and a lesson. When Ira
Glass graduated in 1982 with a degree in Semiotics, his
parents took out an ad in the classifieds: Corporate office
seeks semiotics grad for high paying position." Funny. But
though it rapidly became arcane, Semiotics - the study of
meaning - has had a lasting influence on culture and its
graduates have obtained well-paying positions. It goes to
show that academic work may not have an instant - or even
obvious - payoff and yet still be important. Something to
consider when we make programming decisions based on the
current job market. Via ArtsJournal. By Paul Greenberg,
Boston Globe, May 16, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A Framework of Guidance for Building Good
Digital Collections
About more than just
collections, this framework is a very nice document
describing principles for collections, objects, metadata
and projects. Nothing in here I would disagree with, quite
a bit I would enthusiastically support, and dozens of
references to frameworks, metadata schemas, and more. If
you work with digital repositories or collections, have a
look at this one. This document was originally prepared for
the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and
released in 2001. This is the 2004 version. By Various
Authors, NISO, February 1, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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