Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
May 8, 2008

Identity

As I said to my audience, I prepared for my talk Tuesday by reading Heidegger and walking around Montreal taking photographs. I also met with Seb Paquet and Daniel Lemire. I did this because I had a pretty good idea already of what the content of my talk would be, it being based on my writings on authentication and identification and on resource profiles. So I could allow myself a more liberal sort of preparation.

The result was three separate entities. One was the set of slides and the talk I actually produced, which was pretty basic. The second was a set of notes that captured some of my thinking. And the third was, of course, my set of photographs from Montreal. The theme of all three, from three different directions, is identity (you see this especially in the photos, which probably express what I was trying to say more clearly than the text).

I will have more to say on this.
Stephen Downes, Flickr, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Wikipedia, Flickr] [Comment]

If a Columnist Calls a Tail a Leg...
The funniest thing about the recent critics of all things web, wiki and amateur is that these pundits suppose that we are not willing or not able to see the mistakes and errors - deliberate or otherwise - that permeate our authority-driven information sphere. Because I am picky and critical and analytical when I read, I see these errors all the time, every day, which is why it is for me with a continual sense of astonishment that I see people defer to opinions that are 'well informed' or 'published' or 'authoritative'. Will web scholars of the future 'know truth when they see it?" "The answer, from any web literate scholar, is if you make it easy for me to check it, maybe I will know it when I see it. The web does that in spades, which allows us, ironically, to repair the errors that the Washington Post generates." Mike Caulfield, Weblog, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Books] [Comment]

Http://Www.Groupboard.Com/Products/
As usual Jane Hart describes it without wasting words: "Interactive website tools for education, business and fun. Add whiteboard, chat, games, message boards, VOIP and web conferencing to your site by simply copying a few lines of HTML code." Groupboard. When I tried it, the software advised me that there is a big in OSX Java that causes Groupboard to run very slowly. Yeah, yet another quality Java experience. Jane Hart, Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Chatrooms, Conferencing, Experience, Quality] [Comment]

SIMILE
OK, this is good science. SIMILE stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments and is a set of small, agile tools that help people do semantic-web like tasks without the heartache of parsing XML or making service requests. As you watch the display widget show you one after another, you get the idea that there's a new web happening here. Which reminds me, I really need to write a summary report on Javascript frameworks, because these are game-changing applications. Via Catherine Howell. Various Authors, MIT, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Information, Semantic Web, XML, Metadata] [Comment]

Mashed Up Lamb
I think I have been confused with Stephen Hawking. But despite this crisis of identity, I think that this mash-up of one of Brian's Mashups is worth the two minutes it takes to watch it. It's one of those multimedia pieces that encapsulates a single (complex) thought or idea. One of the new words in our new vocabulary. Here's the is you have trouble with the embedded video on the web page, as I did. Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Video, YouTube] [Comment]

This Ain't Yo Mama's E-Portfolio, Part 1
This is a very good post that captures the idea of how the concept of the e-portfolio is in the process of evolving from something a school manages to something that an individual manages (aka the transition to the PLE, a subcurrent I caught at the e-portfolios conference too). Groom has just posted Part 2 and promises Part 3 some time tomorrow. Jim Groom, WPMU Ed, May 8, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, E-Portfolios] [Comment]

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