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by Stephen Downes
June 19, 2009

Stephen Downes: El futuro del aprendizaje en línea: Diez años después
My thanks are extended to Diego Leal who translated my long paper, The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, into Spanish. Diego Leal, .Edu.Co.Blog, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning] [Comment]

Plain Old Webserver
As a bit of a follow-up to this weeks postings on Opera Unite, this morning I investigated and installed Firefox's 'Plain Old Webserver' (POW) extension. This extension does the same basic thing as Unite - it adds a web server to Firefox. I managed to get it working, though it can't be accessed through my firewall (I would have to open a port to do that). So it's not as simple to use as Unite. There may be other bugs. But the main point is that the concept is out there, and it's just a matter of time before this really takes off. David Kellogg, Website, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Security Issues] [Comment]

Social Media State of the Art Report Released
From the post: "this report provides an overview of the state of the art in social media,and focusses especially on the dynamics of user community participation in social media sites; as part of this, we're also looking at a number of leading social media sites (and one or two 'interesting failures'), particularly in three key areas: news and views, products and places, and networking and dating." The report has an Australian focus. Axel Bruns, Snurblog, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Australia] [Comment]

24 Songs Shared, Nearly $2-Million in Fines
When a court awards a $1.92-million penalty for sharing 24 songs, we have to ask, when will it become clear to people that the law is wrong? Because, any law that allows this, is wrong. Some other things that are wrong (via Charlene croft): a city in Mondata requiring job applicants to submit all of their Web 2.0 logins and passwords. And a bill introduced here allowing government to intercept internet transmissions and gather user information from ISPs. Wrong. And I say: there is a fundamental disconnect between government, and the people they purport to be governing. Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Flash is a Reality, is HTML5 Only a Promise?
I've been hearing a lot more buzz about HTML 5 recently (and, related, Bespin), not so much as competition for Flash, but as something that will greatly enhance the core functionality of web pages, allowing us to embed videos and applications as easily as we now embed images. This was always part of the plan, of course, but it really came derailed over the last five or six years. Expect to see HTML 5 sooner rather than later. As Bex Huff says, "there are millions of people dedicated to making the web better; but only one small part of Adobe is dedicated to making Flash better. The same holds true for Silverlight and JavaFX." More here. Steve Borsch, Connecting the Dots, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video] [Comment]

Friday 5: Twitter 101
I can't imagine anyone reading this list hasn't heard of Twitter, but if you'd like to look into it a bit more deeply than they'll cover it on the evening news, this set of resources is a good starting point.
Lucy Gray, Infinite Thinking Machine, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Twitter] [Comment]

Technology or Unions - which is the problem?
This is worth reiterating. While we read and hear a lot about how the unions must be smashed in order to make progress in education, these same voices don't seem to have any explanation as to why some places with very strong unions - Boora mentions Alberta and Ontario as examples - are at the very top of the PISA survey results. There is no correlation between busting unions and improving educational outcomes. None. Indeed, one wonders whether educational outcomes could be improved if certain critics (like the Wall Street Journal) were rather less partisan, and focused on improving education rather than playing politics. Raj Boora, Editing in the Dark, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

I Believe in Blogging (again)
One of the best things the organizers of the New Media Consortium did at their recent conference was to enlist three people to sit up at the front and live-blog the event. I would imagine the results exceeded their expectations. I have already linked to a couple of their items here, but want in this post to highlight Alan Levine's wrap-up of the event. As he observes, "I am still completely bowled over at how much they added to the experience by doing more than just summarizing." I can't imagine conferences in the future (think ten years, not ten months, because things move slowly) without this sort of additional support - in addition to the live streaming and audio-slides archive, there will be live blogging and comment channels adding to the live event and eventual archive. Because, increasingly, this is where news happens - these conferences are the signature events of academia and increasingly in other fields - and this sort of coverage will be our news coverage. Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, June 19, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Audio, Experience, Academia, Web Logs] [Comment]

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