By Stephen Downes
October 13, 2003
Connexions — Education for a Networked
World
Another bright spot for learning. From the
website: "The Connexions Project is a collaborative,
community-driven approach to authoring, teaching, and
learning that seeks to provide a cohesive body of
high-quality educational content to anyone in the world,
for free. Connexions involves two basic, interrelated
components: a Content Commons of collaboratively developed,
freely-available material that can be modified for any
purpose, and free/Open Source software tools to help
students, instructors and authors manage the information
assets in the Content Commons. Connexions provides an open,
standards-based approach for sharing and advancing
knowledge to benefit the global educational community."
What Connexions now needs most of all (in my opinion) is an
RSS feed; this will make the free content widely available.
Any volunteers? By Various Authors, October, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Another Whack at Spam
That tired
old proposal, to combat spam by charging an email tax, has
surfaced again, this time thanks to Tim Bray. This is such
a bad solution I cannot criticize it enough. Why? because
it kills free publications such as OLDaily. Bray says,
"That means that some formerly-free list subscriptions are
now going to cost you a penny a message. Deal with it; it’s
the price of killing spam." Unacceptable. If all you can
get online is commercial content, then the only message you
will read is a commercial message. It would cost me $600 a
month to send out OLDaily under this plan. Sure, maybe my
costs would be underwritten, but a lot of content unpopular
to governments and commerce would simply be wiped off the
net. What's worse, it wouldn't even stop the spam,
since advertisers are used to forking out cash to get their
message across. This is not a recipe for killing spam, it's
a recipe for killing the free (as in freedom) internet, and
it must be stopped at all costs. By Tim Bray, Antartica,
October 12, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Canadian Public Broadcasters - Online
Educational Resources
Web Tools Newsletter
continues its coverage of national public broadcaster
services for education this week and turns its gaze to
Canada. Where it finds... nothing. "We fail to find any
Schools Broadcasts as such, or sections labelled
Educational - they simply aren't there." The authors find
the explanation, sort of. In Canada, education is a
provincial responsibility, so instead of a national
broadcast education program, we find a series of provincial
ones, each approaching the subject slightly differently
(though, as the authors note, "the CBC's transformation now
looks suspiciously like the adoption of a broad educational
vision"). Though they link to several provincial
initiatives, such as The
Knowledge Network and TVOntario, they miss some of Canada's
major provincial educational services, such as the Open Learning
Agency, Learn Alberta, and Canal
Savoir. It's OK, though. Nobody in Canada understands
the entire Canadian system either. By Graeme Daniel and
Kevin Cox, Web Tools Newsletter, October 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Semantic Web, Today
Via
elearningpost comes this short article describing the
semantic web. The author should probably have taken a
little time to draw out the concepts, but this is an
excellent introduction. Even more impressive is the
treasure trove of links at the end of the article, several
of which follow in this newsletter. By Juan C. Dürsteler,
Inf@Vis!, October 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay
to the Semantic Web
This is a great article
describing clearly how the semantic web will change our
relation to information - and to each other. As I read this
article, I began to sense how what I will call "semantic
opacity" will be necessary for the semantic web to work
properly. In the new semantic web, everyone will have
access to statements like "[Citibank] says (Scott Rahin) is
(Trustworthy)" and "[The Sherriff's Department of Dallas,
Texas] says (Dave Trebuchet) has (Bounced Checks)." But do
I want the world to know what Citibank or some Sheriff's
department thinks about me? Semantic opacity is the idea
that not all information is available to everyone always;
it is a sort of screen or information fog that keeps people
on an essentially "need to know" basis. The semantic web
won't work without it. By Paul Ford, FTrain.Com, July 26,
2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Navigating the Net Just Got
Easier
Amblit is a semantical web browser "with
an intelligent semantic agent and an integrated content
manager." There is no demo available on the site, and you
have to pay money for it sight unseen, which means that it
will never become widely used. Too bad. By Various Authors,
October, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Welcome to the Protégé
Project
This is a very interesting piece of
authoring and editing software intended to facilitate the
creation of ontology based knowledge engines. Unfortunately
written in Java (so it is very slow, even on good
machines), the interface is demonstrated with a newspaper
ontology and content interface. The software is open source
and extensible, which means you can download it and try
adding your own features. This is a fascinating piece of
work that would take a while to understand completely, but
which is definitely pointing the way to next generation
online content. By Various Authors, Stanford Medical
Informatics, October 10, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
What Price Music?
When CDs were
introduced in the mid-1980s, the record companies
re-released their old stock in the new format at double the
price of the original vinyl. People recognize that, and
they recognize that 99 cents a song is no real saving over
the current, inflated, price. "Adjusting for inflation, it
is about 10 times more than 45-r.p.m. singles cost during
their heyday in the 1950's." People know this. Compared to
the price of a coffee, a song is still cheap (though I
don't know where people pay $US 3.99 for a Starbucks). But
when you buy a coffee, you don't sign a contract, you don't
face use restrictions, and you don't give your name, email
address and credit card number. The proper cost for a song
is closer to 9 cents than it is 99 cents, and the proper
business model is an immediate, anonymous, restriction-free
transaction. So we still have a way to go here. By Amy
Harmon, New York Times, October 12, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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