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Howard Knopf doesn’t like The SAC Double Negative Option Celestial Jukebox, but I have to quarrel with a number of his reasons.

Many of these have to do with defending the existing media levy schemes which unfairly extract funds from people who have no intent of copying copyrighted work and who are provided no option for declaring and committing to avoiding such activity when making the purchase.
Until there is provision for specially marked exempt media, the existing levy scheme is just legalized theft and like any other manifestly unfair law it undermines public respect for the law in general.

Also particularly galling is #6 “It’s inherently socialistic” – not because I have socialist tendencies myself (though I do), but because (a) it’s not, and (b) whether it is or not has no relevance to the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, so (c) the accusation is just presented as name-calling.

EXCESS COPYRIGHT: More Myths about Myths about File Sharing

Wikis, GoogleDocs, and now Buzzword Documents all provide ways to share the editing of an online document (as do a number of other options). …more »

that Sir Timmy taught the world to play

Telecom Public Notice CRTC 2008-19, is the CRTC’s notice of proceedings and call for comments re forthcoming hearings on ‘Net Neutrality’.

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From BBC – Radio Labs – How we make websites comes this quote:

It’s nice if URIs are human readable. It’s also nice if they’re hackable. It’s an absolute prerequisite that they’re persistent.

Don’t sacrifice persistence for the sake of prettiness or misguided SEO. URIs are your promise to the web and your users – if you change them or change their meaning you break that promise – links break, bookmarks break, citations break and your search engine juice is lost.

As long ago as 1998 and 1999 the W3C and Jakob Nielsen were giving the same advice, so this isn’t exactly breaking news. But the BBC story shows that the command is taken seriously by the creators of one of the best reputed dynamic web sites on the internet. So why do lesser entities feel the need to intermittently destroy all the value created by their employees in the form of established web presence?

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Open Culture is a website developed by Dan Colman (who moonlights as the director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies program). It focuses on educational video offerings such as the Leonard Susskind
Physics Lectures, and includes
a page of links to other academic YouTube video collections.

In contrast to this study (which I came to via Stephen Downes)showing that the internet just isn’t the danger to children it is often portrayed to be, we have Alec Couros reporting on Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Blog Archive » Flickr Perversion, which is about the unpleasant experience of finding some of his family photos identified as ‘favourites’ by a couple of apparent perverts.
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Scott Leslie writes about the BCcampus Open Educational Resources site with some new ideas for using social networking sites like del.icio.us

Take Action: Say NO to Corporate Control

Open Letter to CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein:

Dear Sir,

Canadians rely on the CRTC, as the federal communications regulator, to act in the public interest, which in this case means ensuring we have an open and neutral Internet.

Due to the limited number of connectivity options, the providers of internet service share an effective monopoly on public access to a global resource (which includes a large amount of publicly funded physical and conceptual infrastructure). This affords those few connectivity providers with the opportunity of hijacking a general public good and diverting its value to their own interests (for example by engaging in media production and sales as well as transmission and then favouring their own content by “throttling” the transmissions of their competitors). Such behaviour is unacceptable and it is your responsibility to ensure that it does not happen.

Corporations like Bell and Rogers must not be allowed to control our access to the Web or degrade the quality of service we receive from our internet service providers.

I therefore submit that the CRTC should order Bell to stop its Internet traffic-shaping practices.

Please protect Canada’s level playing field for free speech and innovation by ordering Bell to cease and desist its “throttling” practices, and be sure to take similar action against any other service provider or other entity which threatens the right of Canadians for equal access to all parts of the internet.

Stephen Downes links to Tom Haskins saying Goodbye College Diplomas

Thank god that the time will soon arrive when a prospective employer will not be denied the pleasure of reading all my undergrad essays but will instead be able to compare that proof of my learning in detail with those of all of the other 126 applicants for his one available position rather than having to rely on brief summary documents “of a few words and transcript numbers”.

And that in my old age there will be no shortage of doctors qualified to treat my ailments by having met their own self-determined educational outcomes.

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Literacy Debate – Online, R U Really Reading? – Series – NYTimes.com

But what do they think I just did with that article? I read it online!

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A couple of weeks ago I posted briefly on (one of the many responses to) Nicholas Carr’s article in the current Atlantic Monthly.

Now I am reading another article on the topic. Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times refers to various recent books and articles about why the “Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks”. One of his referents is Carr’s article and he refers also to a book by Mark Bauerlein with a similar thesis, but his main emphasis is more on the problems of distraction identified by David Meyer and Maggie Jackson rather than the habits of mind.

There are actually two main concerns being expressed. …more »

My friend Gerry Pareja sent this article by John Naughton from The Observer, responding (I think very well) to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘ in The Atlantic, but I can’t say that its arrival is what distracted me from my previous line of thought. In fact I was just tired, but feeling my need for sleep as a sign of lack of commitment-to-task prompted me to start also on my own intended response to Carr – and others who decry the influence of the web and other technology on our mental capacities. …more »

Mike Caulfield provides a brilliant rebuttal of a rather silly column (by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post) supporting the ideas of Andrew Keen about the supposed relative unreliability of the web relative to print. (This came to me via Stephen Downes’ always interesting OLDaily)

Michael Geist has reported briefly on the defense by SAC of its proposal for an internet levy to compensate copyright holders for legalization of file sharing. But what I really want to link to is the first comment following Michael’s report which I believe does a good job of making the case against such levies. I am also glad to see that Ariel Katz seems at least to be aware of some of the very real concerns. This is a point on which Geist sometimes seem to be blinded by his admirable desire to provide a system with full and free flow of information and content. The goal of giving people true ownership of what they purchase is a good one, but having that ownership paid for by granting Letters of Marque for extortion from uninterested third parties is NOT a fair solution.

60 Quality AJAX Resources and Tutorials – Software Developer

This is just something for me to look at more closely when I get time

mathschallenge.net
Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic

In The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen – Books – Review – New York Times Michiko Kakutani delivers a fawning review of Andrew Keen’s diatribe against open media. According to Kakutani Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” Well now! and FOX news is delivering something much more valuable I suppose? Further on in the review we hear that ‘Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century’, but here I have to admit that it may be Kakutani rather than Keen who considers ‘Britney Spears’ to be an ‘idea’ and who blames the internet for the Tulipmania of the 17th century.

This from Stephen Downes is, for me, a reminder to consider whether any of my stuff might be useful One Laptop Per Child and/or the Commonwealth of Learning.