Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
November 26, 2008

My Network Kicks Ass ...DSpace Social Layer Update

More on the idea of a social layer for DSpace, contributed by members of Brian Lamb's network. I would add this: it should also work on my Perl OAI server - yes, maybe I will have to write some code to support it, but if it requires DSpace to work, then it isn't an open social layer, it's just some proprietary thing. Brian Lamb, abject learning, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Content Syndication, Flickr] [Comment]

Readers and Writers Vs. Information Processors
I agree with Tom Hoffman here: "English teachers do not and should not believe that people 'access and use information.' That is not the way we think about the world, and it is not how the world works." It's very tempting to use computer metaphors to describe cognition, but it's wrong. Hoffman writes, "We believe that people read, write and create texts, signs, signifiers, culture." Anyhow, here's the skills map that Hoffman references - not as awful as it first seems, but a bit awkward in its employment of specif tools. Tom Hoffman, Tuttle SVC, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Information] [Comment]

Major Educational Publishers Adopt PLUS
According to this item, "three major educational publishers (McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (part of Reed Elsevier)) have pledged to adopt the image licensing metadata standard by including PLUS term definitions in their standard licensing contracts and asking their image suppliers -- such as stock image agencies -- to embed PLUS metadata in all of their images within a year." The PLUS system employs a Glossary and Media Matrix (or media types) to populate a universal License Format. "This machine-readable data form ties the entire system together, providing a single, worldwide standard for describing licenses." What I wonder is where ContentGuard is in these licensing initiatives - the company says it basically owns the whole domain: is it going to sue someone, or is it licensing technologies to these agencies? Bill Rosenblatt, DRM Watch, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Books, Thomson Corporation, Metadata] [Comment]

CCC Introduces Licensing Service for User-Generated Content
I've always worried that there was a second act to Creative Commons, and here it is: commercial Creative Commons licenses. "This is the type of CC+-based commercial licensing scheme for user generated content that we have been expecting for at least a year. For it was about this time last year that Creative Commons announced its CC+ commercial license -- a compromise between Creative Commons' steadfastly noncommercial (some would say anti-commercial) roots and the copyright licensing scheme's inevitable spillover into the private sector." A lot of people supported Creative Commons because of its "steadfastly noncommercial" roots, and will feel betrayed by the new system. Bill Rosenblatt, DRM Watch, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Patents, Copyrights] [Comment]

Agnes Macphail
This and many more 'heritage minutes' are now available on the historica website. While they do not (yet) support embedding, the individual vignettes can be linked to any web page. Via Pete MacKay. Various Authors, histori.ca, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Video, Macromedia] [Comment]

I Guess Being Misinterpreted Is an Honor
Chris Lott is concerned that I don't link to him enough and he's concerned that I misinterpreted his post on open content. Regarding the former, there is no anti-Lott campaign, I simply read what comes in and evaluate items on their merits, as I see them. As to the latter, he writes, "There are only two narrow 'defenses' involved: the importance of continuing to share content and the help that the OCWC has been in facilitating that activity." Well maybe. Readers can judge for themselves. David Wiley also comments (and to him I will want to one day tell stories about the days I spend in the sandpile out back with my toy cars, building cities and dreaming of the best way to build better roads...). Chris Lott, Ruminate, November 26, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Open Content, OpenCourseWare] [Comment]

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