OUseful Info: Stephen Downes - The Students Own Education

This is an interesting, if somewhat disorganised, piece about Personal Learning Environments. I think it is quite likely to provoke some discussion...but there are some fascinating concepts contained herein.

Some of this stuff is a bit way out, but some of it looks pretty powerful. The sorta stuff that will give those who are used to a traditional teaching environment a sharp intakes of breath and much muttering. In particular, I'm a little uncomfortable in the link to the concept about some of the current social networks - all too easy for naysayers to use material like this to shoot down the whole concept - but hey, we're all open-minded here.

Some of it gets pretty esoteric - I'm sure that most of you could care two hoots about things like Shibboleth...but authentication and cross-domain sign-on will become increasingly important as our learning material is increasingly placed online. Maybe, just maybe, this Identity 2.0 stuff (see earlier post on this) could be an answer to our authentication issues...but we're probably being overly optimistic on this.