OpenID

A few more things to look into:

It looks like RDF is coming to Drupal. This has some interesting implications for learning spaces, and doing things that you just can't do in Blackboard.

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

Over at weblogg-ed, Will Richardson has a post about, among other things, how teachers are increasingly networked outside their district, but not inside their district. As I see it, this is a pretty natural progression, and one that can be loosely compared to how people understood and used the web.

To paraphrase and expand on my comment on his blog:

From Will's post:

But one thing (again) that has really been sticky from EduConn was the idea that local connections support local culture (as well as a few other things, such as leadership, of course) and vice versa.

It looks like Ning has got some new friends -- I first saw the news at everybody's favorite home for digital whispers, and Marc Andreessen confirmed it on his blog.

Marc Canter has something to say about it, and Diego Doval responds.

Some interesting conversations going on around the intarweb.

First, Stephen Downes peeled back the first layer of the onion and described the goals of his project.

Then, there has been some discussion on social networks in general, and the Classroom 2.0 group Steve Hargadon has set up on Ning.

Steve likes Ning's low barrier to entry, while Dave Warlick, by his own admission, doesn't get it. Tony Karrer points out that a social network alone won't do it, but that some degree of common interest is required to unify the discussion. I'll leave my thoughts on Ning, the service, out of this blog post because I'm in a good mood and don't particularly feel like dwelling on flaws.