A Toxic Presence

I'm not sure how to go about it just yet, but surely it is time to mount a campaign to put the toxic local newspaper in our little city out of business.

The Guardian has it right:

"In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out."

As the result of a biased, addled and apparently self-serving campaign, the Times & Transcript has managed to convince City Council to get rid of the best police force in the country.

Not even counting the increased costs of a private police force (which needs buildings, cars, and pensions, all not considered when counting the cost of policing to the city) the change in policing will result in costs of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, to citizens in the form of increased crime, corruption, and increased insurance costs.

None of this matters to the Times & Transcript, or its owners the Irvings, which are much more concerned about salaries being kept "to Maritime levels" for various public services (and, of course, their own employees). That's why they never did publish my letter on the subject - or any letter supporting the RCMP - prior to the Council decision.

This is just one of a series of campaigns undertaken by the newspaper over the years to ensure that New Brunswick in general, and Moncton in particular, remain on the threshold of poverty. The newspaper is opposed to all forms of public services, constantly railing against expenses on things like the Firehall (which they felt should have vinyl siding and absolutely positively no art), the Dieppe swimming pool, and even Enterprise Greater Moncton.

Rather, the newspaper - which is almost entirely supported by car dealership advertising (not surprising given that it is owned by an oil company) - does constantly argue for wider (and straighter) roads, against crosswalks and bike lanes, against, indeed, anything that would deter its editors from racing their minivans wherever they please (they also love ATVers, and constantly make excuses for their destruction of trails and private property).

This has to end.

Because what seems to happen time and time again is that bits of New Brunswick - like the Moncton of today - seem poised to rise above being service stations and cheap labour for The One Big Company only to be dragged back into the mire.

The Times & Transcript is able to get away with this because it is basically the only local media in the city. This has to end. An alternative needs to be created. Something needs to be done.

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Building Complex Events

A complex event is one consisting of many parts. A conference is an example of a complex event: there may be one conference, but there are many individual sessions. People may attend the conference as a whole, but what they actually attend are the individual sessions (and parties, and keynotes, and meals - each of these can be an event).

Online Events Daily supports complex events. It does this by creating a system of 'parent' and 'child' events. These parent-child relationships are defined in the child, and consist of a pointer to the parent. In Online Events Daily, every child event is an individual free, open and online event.
Parent relations are defined using three elements:

• event:owner_url - this is the top level domain defining the owner of the event. Updates harvested via RSS-Events must originate from somewhere in the owner_url domain.
• event:identifier - each event has its own identifier. Identifiers are managed by the event owner and may be whatever the owner wishes. It is expected that each identifier will be unique within the owner's domain.
• event:parent - the value of a child's event:parent element is the value of the parent's event:identifier element.

As you can see, this defines a hierarchy of events, with child events pointing to their parent events. In Online Events Daily, a parent does not have to have an event:access value, so long as it eventually has children. To create the event hierarchy, it is easiest to create the parent event first, then create the child events, pointing to the identifier of the parent event.

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Online Events Daily

Create Your Own Events

Though my system is not yet ready for prime time, it's up and running and ready for some live data. Not everything works, but almost everything works, and I'd really like to get people's feedback and opinions.

Here's the site: Online Events Daily

Here's the dynamic version of the front page. This site lists free and open live online events that are taking place now. You can have your events listed here, provided they are:

• Live - they have to take place in real time, preferably with a live text or audio chat.
• Open - they have to be accessible to anyone. Yes, you can require a registration, but no, you can't require pre-registration. Why? The whole idea is to allow people to see what's on now and go there, without planning.
• Free - you cannot charge for admission.

OK, your event satisfies these conditions? Great. Here's how the system works:

You create RSS-Event feeds and post them on your website. I harvest these feeds and display the events here.

The idea is that I can harvest RSS-Event feeds from many places, bring them all together, organize them chronologically, and let people know what's happening right now.

RSS-Events is a format specific to this site (though I hope it will spread). So this site also gives you a way to create your own RSS-Events feed. Eventually, though, I hope you'll just create them yourself, from the template. Here's a sample RSS-Events file. The RSS-Events schema is available here.

First, create an use account on this website. Click here to create your account. Come back to this page when you're done. (Note, OLDaily registrations will not work here; you need to create a new account.)

Second, create a sample event. Use this form to create your first event. This is a detailed form intended to guide you through the process.
The form is intended to be used only once or twice. I don't want you to always use this form. There are more convenient forms further in, and as I stated above, I would rather you created your own RSS-Events file. One step at a time, though.

Third, once you've crearted an event you'll gain access to the event management services.
- List your events and edit them
- Create New Event

Fourth, when you look at your event list, you will be able to find out your person number (it will be stated near the top of the page, like this: "You are person number: 8808"). This person ID can be used to create three separate pages:

• Event Listing - http://events.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?format=events&person=8808
  Use this listing to look at all your events, or copy the page and post it in your blog or on a web page.
• Standard RSS Listing - http://events.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?format=rssplain&person=8808
  This is ordinary RSS and can be used to create an RSS feed that will be aggregated by Google Reader or other RSS readers just like normal.
• RSS-Events Listing- http://events.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?format=rssevents&person=8808
  
  This feed lists your events in RSS-Events. Place this feed on your website and tell me where it is (email me at stephen@downes.ca (eventually I'll just make a form). Then you can add events to the feed just by editing the feed, and they'll show up automatically.
  
  Note that for security purposes, your feed must be in the domain identified in owner_url. So use a general domain (like, say, http://www.tyourname.com/ ) as owner_url, then post your feed under it (like, say, http://www.tyourname.com/yourevents.xml )

You might wonder, why do I do it this way?

First and foremost, I want you to own your own data. By keeping the events feed on your site, you control it. Want to change the title, URL, date? Just change your feed.

Second, I don't want to monopolize event listings. Yes, I know, good business sense says that I should gather all the data and keep it for myself. Like Facebook. But I think we get a better system if everybody can aggregate events and create event listings.

Finally, yes, I will eventually harvest iCal and hevent, etc. And I'll produce ical and hevent, etc.
Why didn't I use those formats to begin with? Because, honestly, they are too limited. I wanted to include things like access URLs, online environments, hosts and presenters, etc., which you can't do in those other formats.

Also, I wanted to create complex events. More on that as I get more written.

Now again, note, it's not fully automated yet. I have to update the front page and do the harvests manually, which means you won't see stuff happen right away. But, have fun with it, and send me email at stephen@downes.ca if you have any complaints or suggestions.

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Managing Metadata with Resource Profiles

Paper prepared for an upcoming conference.

Abstract

Existing learning object metadata describing learning resources postulates descriptions contained in a single document. This document, typically authored in IEEE-LOM, is intended to be descriptively complete, that is, it is intended to contain all relevant metadata related to the resource. Based on my 2003 paper, Resource Profiles1, an alternative approach is proposed. Any given resource may be described in any number of documents, each conforming to a specification relevant to the resource. A workflow is suggested whereby a resource profiles engine manages and combines this data, producing various views of the resource, or in other words, a set of resource profiles.

Resources and Resource Descriptions

Educators employ a wide variety of resources. Even in pre-internet days, educators would employ books and notes, classrooms, maps and diagrams, guest speakers, field trips, and more. In the internet era, educational resources can include all of these and more, including online resources, presentations animations, simulations, synchronous events, web quests, online mentoring, multi-user games, and more. Indeed, while some resources may be more or less pedagogically explicit, almost any resource may be used for educational purposes, and when it becomes so used, it becomes (by definition) an educational resource.

Though any resource, including non-digital resources, may be described digitally, using (for example) the Resource Description Framework, it should be apparent from their diversity that a single metadata profile will be inadequate to the task of describing the full range of educational resources. Moreover, even the attempt to encompass all required metadata in a single document produces an unwieldy, and mostly unused, set of elements. Moreover, there is no clear and obvious way to encompass the contributions of multiple authors, especially in the case of matters of opinion. Therefore, resources should not be described with a single document, but rather, with a set of documents, with each document addressing a particular aspect of the resource and authored by the person or entity in the best position to address that aspect.

Three Types of Metadata

For any given resource, a large number of types of metadata may be provided. Existing specifications are illustrative of the types of metadata that may be created. For example, Dublin Core provides documents with bibliographic metadata. VCard and similar formats suggest approaches to author metadata. EXIF and other media-specific data suggest approaches to technical metadata. This list could be extended indefinitely, but in general, there are three major types of metadata, identifiable by the distinct people or entities that author them.

First Party Metadata is metadata related to the creation and nature of the resource itself. It is authoritative metadata authored by the creator or the owner of the resource. One set of examples of first party metadata include bibliographic metadata, which describes the resource authorship, publication data, version sets or editions, and related information. Another set of examples of first party metadata includes technical metadata, describing the authoring tool, technical specifications and formats, appropriate player software, dimensions and size, and related information. A third type of first party metadata is licensing metadata, as described (say) in ODRL or Creative Commons.

Second Party Metadata is metadata related to the use of the resource. Second party metadata is authoritative when generated by the person or entity that actually uses the resource. Interestingly, while second party metadata is widely created and used on the internet, most of it is hidden and stored in proprietary formats. An excellent example of second party metadata is the Page Rank, named for Google founder Larry Page, which is a measure of the times a resource is accessed through a search, the number of times the resource is linked by other resources, and similar criteria. Another type of second party metadata is found in the form of server logs, which reveal access data, page referrers, software and computing environment used, and more. Another example is the Scholarly Works Usage Profile (SWUP)2 Second party educational metadata can include context of use (for example, in a course or program) and assessment data relative to the resource.

Third Party Metadata is metadata related to the evaluation, description or classification of resources. Third party metadata is typically authored by an entity or agency independent of both the resource author and potential resource clients or users. Such metadata would typically be created by librarians or reviewers and is authoritative relative to the assessment board, classification board or archival agency. Content rating metadata, such as PICS, is an example of third party metadata. Classification and indexing data, including Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications, constitute third party metadata (even if authored by the resource creator, as the resource creator may be non-authoritative with respect to classification). Educational metadata, such as semantic density, classification against educational standards or curricula, typical age range, and similar evaluative criteria, constitute third party metadata.

Distributed Metadata and Resource Identifiers

As suggested above, it is expected that the metadata describing a resource may be located in multiple files, and hence, may be located in multiple locations. There is therefore a need to identify a single resource across a number of different files. This need exists independently of resource profiles, and typically one of two major approaches is used: either an identity-based approach, using a registry, such as Purl, DOI or Handle; or a location-based approach, such as URI. Obviously, a combination may be employed, as Handles, etc., can map to URIs.3

That said, it does not follow that there must be one universal system for resource identifiers. Any given resource may have any number of identifiers, with identifiers created by specific agencies for particular purposes. By analogy, we can consider the case of people, who while they may have non-unique names or titles, may have any number of unique identifiers from specific agencies such as Social Insurance Numbers, driver's license numbers, passport numbers, and more. It is common for publishers to assign their own identifier, and common for repositories to assign unique identifiers for resources acquired from numerous publishers. An identity is just another piece of data, which has as a property a mechanism for accessing the resource it identifies.

Educational Metadata

The specific purpose of an educational standards organization should be to specify that metadata unique to educational purposes. There are three major types of educational metadata: educational standards metadata, educational properties metadata, and educational use metadata.

Educational standards metadata describes a resource's relation to an educational standard. An educational standard may be described with curriculum metadata (for example, as documented on the old BECTA curriculum metadata page4), course description metadata5, or competencies metadata, as for example employed by Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe (MACE)6. The purpose of educational standards metadata is to map the current resource to one or more elements in an index or taxonomy, and is therefore typified by the Catalog-Entry fields found throughout IEEE-LOM.

Educational properties metadata describes properties of a resource that may be relevant to the selection of a resource. IEEE-LOM includes a number of educational properties metadata elements under the general Educational metadata heading, including interactivity type, learning resource type, interactivity level, semantic density, intended end user role, typical age range and difficulty.7 It should be apparent that these do not exhaust the list of potential educationally-relevant properties. Additionally, the value space provided in IEEE-LOM does not exist the possible desired set of value spaces.

Educational Use Metadata describes what is expected or intended to be the context of use of the resource. In IEEE-LOM some educational use metadata is specified in the Relation element. However, additional specifications, such as IMS Simple Sequencing and IMS Learning design, describe educational use in separate documents. Arguably, IMS Content Packaging is an additional form of educational use metadata. The implementation of a learning resource in a specific environment, with the application of specific system tools or resources, as described in Learning Tools Interoperability, also constitutes a source of information about the resource.

While the data produced or used to created these three types of metadata may be suggested or produced by the resource author or through the use of a resource, each of these forms of metadata depends on a third party evaluation of the resource in question. Such metadata therefore constitutes third party metadata, and is not regarded as authoritative if proceeding from a resource author, but rather only if it proceeds (or is verified) by a third party registrar or agency. You can tell the Library of Congress where you think your book belongs, but it is the librarian, not you, who decides.

Using Resource Profiles

The single-document approach to metadata suggests that what can be known about a learning resource can be collected in a single place and used as an a priori form of document indexing in a single repository or library. By this point it should be clear that learning resources need to be described by multiple entities, in multiple ways, using descriptions that are widely varied in nature, authorship and location.

The distributed model of metadata described in this paper is intended to be leveraged to form descriptions that are, first, current and regularly updated, and second, tailored to specific user needs. In this way, the resource profiles approach recognizes that the consumers of learning resource metadata have as many distinct perspectives, interests and needs as the authors themselves.

When a resource is newly created, very little is known about it. While the developer may express opinions about its applicability, difficulty or educational relevance, these are properties that can only be verified through experience. As the resource matures through use and repurposing, its metadata matures as well. If a resource proves to be popular, more and more sources of information become available - it was used here, it was reviewed there, it was linked over there. Thus, the aggregation and storage of metadata describing a given resource needs to be ongoing. This becomes especially important as a resource ages and may fall out-of-date. Recent information will be significantly more relevant than metadata produced on the day the resource was created.

When resource metadata is collected from various sources into a particular repository, specific resource profiles of that resource may be created by combining different elements of the metadata files. While a single all-encompassing profile could in theory be produced, by conjoining all elements of all files describing the resource, such a profile is neither anticipated nor desired. Rather, what is expected is that profiles corresponding to specific needs will be created by conjoining only selected elements from different metadata files. A programmer who is implementing a resource in a technical framework will want technical and educational use metadata, while a subject matter expert will be more interested in second party metadata along with educational properties and educational use metadata.

A resource profiles enabled repository or data store, therefore, will be enabled with a resource profiles engine that selects elements from different files and combines them to form new, and possibly unique, descriptions of a given resource. The definition of a particular type of description is termed, in general, a 'profile'. Each profile may serve a particular purpose, and is composed of a set of one or more rules or procedures for the selection of data values from one or more possible types of input files, and one or more procedures or rules for the presentation of those values to the user.


1 Stephen Downes, Resource Profiles, November 23, 2003. http://www.downes.ca/files/resource_profiles.htm

2 Benoit Pauwels, Exchange of usage metadata in a network of institutional repositories: the case of Economists Online, Academic Online Resources: Assessment and Usage International Symposium, Lille, 27 November 2009, Slideshare, http://www.slideshare.net/bpauwels/exchange-of-usage-metadata-in-a-network-of-institutional-repositories-the-case-of-economists-online

3 Andy Powell, Pete Johnston, Lorna Campbell, Phil Barker, Guidelines for using resource identifiers in Dublin Core metadata and IEEE LOM, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi-ieee/identifiers/

4 Metadata guide for tagging, Curriculum Online, BECTA, 7 November 2003. http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=40282

5 M. Pezeril, Course description metadata (CDM): A relevant standard for technology- supported learning, Experience-BVased Quality in European ODL seminar, September 21, 2006, http://www.e-quality-eu.org/pdf/seminar/e-Quality_WS2_MPezeril_article.pdf

6 OUNL, with contributions from partners, Integration of Competence Metadata in MACE, 30 May 2008, http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/1764/1/Mace%20Deliverable%205.5%20-%20Integration%20Of%20Competence%20Metadata%20In%20Mace.pdf

7 Wayne Hodgins, et.al., Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata, IEEE 1484.12, 15 July, 2002, http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/files/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf

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The Religion Card

Responding to James Morton, who argues, "Canada is a nation rooted in faith."

No. Canada WAS a nation rooted in faith. But with 4 in 10 Canadians no longer religious (by your own statistics) we cannot say that faith is any more a foundational value in this country.

What has allowed Canada to remain peaceful and harmonious is that, for the most part, we have managed to keep matters of faith out of the public sphere. We were founded from the very beginning with a potentially divisive Catholic-Protestant split, and in more recent years have seen large influxes of Muslims, Hindus and Jews. And, of course, atheism has risen dramatically in recent years.

The purpose of public policy, at least in this our peaceful and diverse society, is to enable people of many faiths to interact together under a single legal and social framework. This very much means that no particular religion can or should have the means to impose its particular view on society.

This is not to say that people can not or should not live and represent their moral and spiritual values. Nobody has a problem with that, not even the atheists.

Rather, it means that if you advocate "policy x" because your religious views compel you to do so, your advocacy of "policy x" will have to be on the basis of its own merits, not because "Canada was founded based on the principles of religion y". Indeed, people - excepting those of your particular creed - will find such a tactic (in this country, at least) divisive and an attempt to seed racial and religious disharmony.

To advocate otherwise is to emperil the basis on which this country was founded, a basis that enshrines freedom and diversity of race, language, faith and opinion.

Play the religion card with great caution. You may be religious; I don't care. But when you try to cram religion into government, I get very very upset.

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Three Models of Knowledge Production

Harold Jarche weighs in with a much improved version of the model describing personal knowledge management, which now has these as intermediate stages between gathering and distributing:
- Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
- Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
- Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
- Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
 Customization (describing information in context)




That said, while this is a much better model than this, I think it stays true to the original 'filtering' vision, where you go from data to wisdom through successive filtering processes. And while there are different ways to think of knowledge - processed, procedural, propositional - this model I think adheres to a more basic view.



Here's what I think. The picture being presented by Jarche and his colleagues adhere to a 'mining' model of knowledge management (from which we get phrases like 'data mining'). But it's just one perspective, and arguably not the best. It should be contrasted with some alternatives:

1. knowledge production as mining - on this view, data is like a raw material that is searched for and retrieved. It can be filtered, assessed and remixed, but is elemental. You add value by creating more and more refined metals, alloys, compounds and materials out of what was there, but you can never create anything that is different in nature from what was there in the first place, but you can be very sure of what you have, and the value is derived in the reliability of the process and the difficulty of obtaining such pure resources. The model is like the mining of ore to create gold to make jewellery. This is the Jarche / PKM view, at least as described thus far.

2. knowledge production as construction - on this view, data is like a raw material, but you work with it with your hands, and create something new out of what you have been given. While you cannot add material over and above what you have been given, you add value to it by giving it form and function. Knowledge construction gives you the ability to create abstractions, to treat raw materials as signs and symbols, and to make meaning out of data. the model is like the mining of clay to make bricks to build houses.
 

3. knowledge production as growth - on this view, data is like a raw material that serves as a nutrient or growth medium. It is absorbed into the system - a plant or animal - and integrated into an existing organism. The raw material isn't itself transformed or reshaped into something new, but rather nourishes and contributes to the growth of the organism, which in turn creates something new and unexpected. The model is like soil that grows a plant that in turn produces a flower.

The different approaches each stress different aspects of knowledge (or, arguably, are the result of different stresses).

The mining approach stresses accuracy and purity. Getting the right data, getting accurate data and validating data are of critical importance. It is an approach that is going to focus of 'best' - as in "best practices" - or on demonstrated reliability.

The construction approach, by contrast, is focused on sameness and identity.  Because the construction approach combines material with form to satisfy purpose, the elements being worked stand in a representational relation to the world. They mean something. And this meaning must be consistent, must be the same, from instance to instance. Standards-based, meaning-based and representational systems, such as the Semantic Web, are illustrative of construction approaches.

Finally, the growth approach is focused on creation and creativity. The 'knowledge' produced from the input is contained in the state of the system as it grows and produces. The flower that absorbs water and nutrients from the soil, carbon from the air and genetic information from the seed produces new knowledge in the form of a flower that reflects all three of those inputs as they are organized into complex and interactive living systems.

The organic model is the only one of the three in which knowledge and wisdom are not 'outputs' of the process, the only one in which knowledge and wisdom remain as properties of the knowing system. The flower is not the 'knowledge' of the flower, it is an artifact that serves a purpose - to attract bees, to assist propagation, to beautify a house, to feed a cow - and from which the knowledge that is contained in the plant can only be inferred.

The organic model is also the only model in which there are not 'consumers' and 'producers' of knowledge and wisdom. In the mining and construction models, the output of the system is some sort of refined or constructed product, which is then in turn consumed by some knowledge-seeking agent. However, according to the organic model, each agent is the sole source of its own knowledge, and it cannot pass along that knowledge per se, but rather, passes along artifacts, such as flowers or seeds, which can become the raw material for other entities in the system to create their own knowledge.

By contrast, the first two approaches will focus much more on information and literacy skills. Because the process of producing knowledge and wisdom from data is essentially transformative and evaluative, an emphasis on those capacities is required. As Brodie and Brodie argue, citing Laurillard, "the more enduring qualities are the skills, attitudes and ways of thinking derived from the course."

In the case of human knowledge, of course, elements of all three models are present. We filter and refine, we build and represent, and we grow and create. And aspects of each inform elements of the other.

Filtering, for example, is not merely a matter of selecting the best and purest. It is also a matter of selecting the most salient, the most relevant and the most important. We filter naturally, as when the senses ignore extraneous information to present us with a world of objects, sounds and shadows. And we filter deliberately, when doubting a testimony or refusing to be fooled by a mirage. Filtering and refining are matters of growth and learning, which is why a vintner can detect differences in wine that would elude a casual wine-taster.

Constructing and representing depend not only on our natural ability to associate one object with another in our minds, but on our ability to filter and select those properties worth representing. The logic of semantics allows for infinite was of describing the world, but in fact we agree upon roughly consistent sets of properties and objects, with words and phrases to describe them. Semantic ability, again, while manifest in the artifacts, such as words and descriptions we share with the world, is actually located in the brain (some even say innate in the brain).

Growth and creativity, meanwhile, would be futile without some means of selecting and filtering resources, and meaningless without some way of creating representations and constructing meaning. Even the flower, which attracts the bee, acts in a representative manner; the flower, to the bee, means nectar. The association present in the bee's memory is what makes the representation possible, but the plant, too, depends on that representation in order to attract the bee to help it spread pollen. A creative act is never a random act, never a pointless act; it is always informed with a sense of refinement and purpose.

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Here Is Where I Grew Up...

Inspired by Dough Peterson's My Childhood Community, I have collected some Google Street view images from my old home town. Here is where I grew up, the small town of Metcalfe, Ontario, about a half hour south of Ottawa. I was here from Grade 4 (moving from a suburb of Montreal) to Grade 12 (ages 10-18).

As you can see, Metcalfe is a small farming community. It is about twice as large now as when I gre up. The forest to the north west of the town was a source of adventure, as was the creek that flowed though the centre of town and out to the southwest.

Here is where we lived:

You have to look closely but there's a house down that laneway. It has white aluminum siding and red shingles. We put that on when I almost burned the house down in 1974 or so. That's when we expanded the original 100 year-old farmhouse (I guess it's 140 years old now) to include a new living room and more bedrooms - and added insulation so we wouldn't need to use the wood stove. It looks like the big elm at right still survives. I almost died one day when, about 40 feet up, I slipped and almost fell.

I moved that front lawn more times than you can count. We had a baseball diamond on it, which my father and I built, backstop and all. I planted the hedge in front and many of the trees (my mother would have planted the rest).

Here is the Anglican Church that was just a few houses down from me.

I went to this church for a bit, and was confirmed here, but it didn't really take and when they asked me to stop teaching Sunday School (my classes were heavy on Bible study, light on references to God) I drifed away.

My best friends, Charles and Harold Newin, lived in this old house across the street from the Church. It would have been an old rectory. They moved back to Ottawa in 1974 or so, which was sad for me.

We were all enthralled by the creek, would dream of taking a raft down it (and made numerous rafts). We wrote stories about travel and adventure. If you look at the porch to the left (it's out of sight, you can only see the edge of the eave) you'll see a hollow in one of the steps created by a rocket I built and launched there.

This is downtown Metcalfe.

The store on the right with the Coke sign was Anna's Confectionary. Anna was a tiny 80-year-old woman who ran the store and was taken advantage of by all the other kids (not me though, I really liked Anna and she once let me in the back to see her house, which looked like it was from the 1880s). After Anne died it became Metcalfe Pizza and a new coat of paint covered the spray-painted (no doubt by a customer) "Anne's" on the side.

The double building on the left had apartments in it. I knew a few people in that building over the years. One girl, Kathy, lived there and was in my class when I was in grade 4. her family moved away - and she showed up 30 years later as the wife of one of my colleagues at NRC who lives in Fredericton. Small world.

Beside it, the single house with the proch, was the location of Bab's Groceteria (Bab's standing for Betty Allan Barry). I liked Bab's and would go there for groceries. I once begged them for a job, and was finally given a position sorting a huge pile of buttons, which lasted about two days.

The vacant lot losted the "brick block", an apartment block that was abandoned even when I lived there. I drank my first alcohol in the Brick Block (caribou, a mixture of white wine and vodka) and had my first, um, intimate moments there.

This is the rest of downtown. The bridge over the creek is new - it had green-painted metal railings when I was a kid. To the right just after the bridge was Stanley's Store, which I also liked. It was kind of half way between Bab's and Anna's - lots of candy, but groceries too. On the left the houses have been removed and the town now has Albvert Bouwers's park (he is the Reeve who built it) complete with a completely useless  little bridge over the creek. Bouwers lived next to us and his family - like a lot of people in Metcalfe - was from Holland. One thing they brought with them was an inclination to build little gardens, bridges, and perfectly manicured landscapes.

The store with the Green roof at the corner of Victoria and Alberta was MacLaren's Grocery. Don MacLaren was a non-nonsense business owner who catered mostly to the farmers in the region and didn't put up with any nonsense from us kids. So I didn't hang out there at all and didn't like it.

The brick building across from MacLaren's was a hardware store, but it had closed even before I moved there.

Up the road a bit was the Township Hall.

The library was around back, and that's where I went in. It was a tiny library and I read a good proportion of its collection, including my first science fiction books, including John Christopher's series, The White Mountains, and Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust.

Metcalfe is no longer a town and Osgoode is no longer a township. Both are now considered a part of the City of Ottawa. By everyone, I suppose, except the people who live there, who had no say in the change.

Going up Albert Street (now called the Eighth Line Road) we see the United Church on the left.

I didn't go to the United Church. My mother was originally United (my father Anglican) and we went to the United Church when I was in Montreal, but I went to the closer church in Metcalfe. I always thought it was odd that they had their own little cups for communion.

A block up Alberta Street was Metcalfe Public School.

It looks the same today as i did when I first started attending it in 1968 (though I have some memory of an expansion to the back, to replace the portable classrooms, like the one I was in in Grade 5).

The office was in the centre recessed area, and when you go on those doors (I never did, I went in the blue doors) you will see a trophy case. You might see my public speaking prizes from 1970 and 1972.

Just up Albert Street we see the Separate school, St. Catherine's School, and across from it, St. Catherine's Church. The priest lived in the house on the near side of the church. He is the one who told me about football.

Further up Albert Street we see the Metcalfe Community Centre. It was originally a wooden barn-like structure, but it burned down one night after a social event. But they saved the ice-making plant, by far and away the most valuable part of the building. The new community centre took the entire resources of the Village to build, and was built during the winter - that's how important it was. One of the walls collapsed when it was being built and a man died.

I spent a lot of time in the Community Centre. I played all my hockey there. I was a Metcalfe Jets fan and attended all the games, even acting as a goal judge (until the day I called a close one againt the home team, and never acted as goal judge again - but I can see it today as clear as day, the puck was over the line, and was scooped out by the goalie).

Beyond it is the Curling Club, looking like a mini version of the old arena. That's where I played my one and only game of curling (and won, leaving me with a perfect record).

Finally, Osgoode Township High School. The big sign on the gym wall is new, but otherwise it is as it was when I attended. Again, it was expanded while I was there to remove some portable classrooms. I went there for four years, always entering through the main door by the gym, past all the trophies and the OTHS double-blue society names. All that had been discontinued by the time I got there, so despite being an honour student, and winning various events (like public speaking, three more times) you won't see my name anywhere in the school.

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