Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
May 15, 2008

Following Stephen's Web
A different perspective on this website. Seeing what someone else thinks are the 'top 5' posts (of the last 100) in OLDaily is interesting. Well, to me at least. TonNet, education and tech, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Common Cartridge Is Cool; LTI Is Even Cooler
Well-informed post on recent developments in interoperability standards. I've had a look at the Common Cartridge stuff; it's cool but not groundbreaking (and would probably have gained a bit more traction had people been able to freely access the specifications without having to shell our real money to join the consortium). LTI - Learning Tools Interoperability - is a concept with some merit, corresponding roughly with the distributed nature of web 2.0 applications. If you want to view the specification you will be greeted with a message, "The page you are trying to access is reserved for participants in the IMS/GLC Community." I don't care it "It's easy and free to join" - creating this sort of barrier is exactly contrary to the concept of open specifications. Michael Korcuska, Sakai Blog, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Interoperability, Cool] [Comment]

Notices of Appeal Filed; Blackboard Jumps the Gun
Desire2Learn has filed its notice of appeal in the Blackboard patent lawsuit case. Meanwhile, Blackboard has filed a motion in an Ontario court in an effort to enforce the Texas settlement (Blackboard has no patents in Canada). Unattributed, Desire2Learn, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Desire2Learn, Patents, Canada, Copyrights, Blackboard Inc., Patents] [Comment]

BECTA Rejects Office 07
According to this report, Britain's BECTA has rejected Microsoft Office, arguing that it does not support open standards. "The report's conclusions could end up costing Microsoft millions of dollars in lost sales in the U.K. public sector market." Tim Hand, Tim's Blog de Blog, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Open Standards, Great Britain, Microsoft] [Comment]

More Social Metadata: APML and ULML
I have been calling this type of metadata 'second party metadata', while Scott Wilson is here using the term 'social metadata'. As he describes, "APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile [and] ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services." He's quite right when he says "neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon" but here's how it ought to work (it won't, not without a lot of kicking and screaming first, because of commercialization and privacy issues): this metadata is made accessible for harvesting, and when it is harvested, is used to create resource profiles, which assist in the distribution of resources. Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Web Services, Accessibility, Metadata] [Comment]

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi
This is a powerful essay (language warning) on the nature and future of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The telling point is near the end: "the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging - this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops." There's a lot more in here - including, for example, his criticism of OLPC's non-existent deployment plan. And he writes, "I quit when Nicholas told me - and not just me - that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there." Via One Laptop Per Child News. Ivan Krstic, code culture, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Operating Systems, Project Based Learning, Portable Computers] [Comment]

JISC Information Envirionment Team
Just got an email saying that "the 'Information Environment' team at JISC (responsible for repositories among many other things) has a new(ish) blog... We're using it for a few things, including highlighting interesting new work from the various programmes of work underway." Various Authors, JISC, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Information, Learning Object Repositories, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Web Logs] [Comment]

Information Design Patterns
Interesting site with a lot of useful information, though the Flash interface makes it hard to navigate and impossible (of coirse) to cut and paste. Via elearningpost. Christian Behrens, Website, May 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Information, Online Learning] [Comment]

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