Grateful Dead lyricist, rancher, EFF founder. (more)

This past fall got thinking a lot about the need for P2P software because of WikiLeaks, plus earlier John Robb Dark Net thinking - 2010-09-04-HostingAndFutureProofingP2pApp. (more)

CyberSecurity bill. (more)

Open Education Resource(s)

Open Standards designed for controlling electronic Musical Instrument-s. (more)

teacher with focus on EduPunk Educational Technology (more)

Work on a technical definition for open content has been undertaken by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) gives a set of conditions for openness in knowledge - much as the Open Source Definition does for Open Source software. Content can be either in the public domain or under a license which allows re-distribution and re-use, such as Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution-Sharealike licenses or the GFDL. It is worth noting that the OKD covers Open Data as well as open content... It is possible that the first documented case of open content was the Royal Society Of London, which aspired to share information across the globe as a public enterprise. The term "open content" was first used in the modern context by David Wiley, then a graduate student at Brigham Young University, who founded the Open Content Project and put together the first content-specific (non-software) license in 1998, with input from Eric Raymond, Tim OReilly, and others. (more)

Check Vist is an Issue Tracker that supports a Task Hierarchy. Even the free version sounds darn good. Has an API, too. But needs to be an Issue TrackerWiki (for me).

WorkFlowy is a To-Do List supporting a Task Hierarchy. But no Collaboration, no dates.

Peter Gray quotes respondents to an UnSchooling survey about the benefits they see. "I love watching my kids grow and learn and ask questions. I love having one less thing to worry about (finding the time for "school") and I love being able to skip curriculum shopping and planning. I also look around at other homeschoolers and feel sorry for their constant stress and worry. (Is my kid learning enough? Did we pick the right curriculum? How much does homeschooling cost?) I see traditional homeschoolers so burned out by the stress they make for themselves. Don't they know their kids will learn despite them?" (more)

Tweet Deck has a new Deck Ly service that allows long Tweets (Twitter). (more)

Eric Siu gives 44 Content Marketing links.

Learning Management System, an Educational Technology (more)

Nicholas Kristof looked into Factory Farm-ed Chicken. (more)

Steve Hargadon says: Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning, is preparing to release Version 2 of her current project, Mighty Bell... I won't steal her thunder, but the commitment to Social Learning, content curation, and online conversation in this version have the potential to make Mightybell the 21st-century replacement for the Text-Book many of us have been waiting for. (more)

Phil Jones envisions (Phil Jones:SmallTalkUnix) an alternate-world-history based on integrating SmallTalk with the PlainText-FileSystem-and-pipe-based UNIX EcoSystem rather than being isolated. Smalltalk could have become the graphical shell on top of Unix, providing it instantly with a sophisticated GUI (rather than wait for the X consortium to re-invent the wheel)... With Smalltalk established as the only serious GUI / Unix scripting game in town, Mac and Windows would have had to be more Smalltalk-like... And yet people would have still kept source-code in Subversion and Git. And used diff and patch (and occasionally sed) and all the other Command Line goodies... By the mid-90s, the default Web Browser would have been assembled from flexible Smalltalk components. The Web Server might have had some fast C innards, but the majority of it would be written in industrial-strength Smalltalk. Lion Kimbro's] hope for a web, not of documents but of networked GUI components would have been a plausible development in that environment. This reminds me of recent discussions about the need for more progress in development environments (IDE).

Michael Feldstein profiles the Good Semester learning platform. We started with a few tools, moved to an all-in-one, all-you-can-eat LMS model, and now are moving back toward more specialized systems... Jason Rappaport doesn’t know what to call the product category the Good Semester falls into, but he is emphatic that it is not an LMS. He describes it as “EverNote meets GoogleDocs meets Drop Box.” One thing those three products have in common is that they approach collaboration from the perspective of the utility for an individual... The Good Semester team has started by focusing on the student rather than the teacher. And your content is yours forever. Your courses don’t disappear at the end of the semester... This isn’t just an improved Grade Book. It’s a complete rethink of the application category. The classic LMS grade book is all about tabular data. It basically re-implements Microsoft Excel—badly. But MsExcel is an extremely poor model. Teachers don’t want to manipulate category weightings and write formulas. They want to use their assessments of students’ performance on individual assignments to derive an overall progress indicator (in the form of a course grade) through a formula that is fair to all the students in the class. Good Semester starts from that goal and achieves it through a completely novel set of visualization tools. (more)

I want to be able to run Python on Android, esp a local Desktop Web Server. (more)

Joshua Allen expresses his philosophical concern with any Gift Economy. Dave McCusker rebuts in part I'm utterly in favor of game systems (Systems And Games) in which value is very hard to measure (Legibility). In fact, I think this promotes Creativity and Innovation. Games with closed value systems are too easy to rig for Reductionism. Which means they are stupid and boring games, and tend to concentrate power.

John Seabrook on Will Wright. (more)