BBC Reveals Open-source Video Technology
Just what the world needed to counteer the mess that has been proprietary digital video formats (and the maze of incompatable technologies that naturally followed): Dirac (named after the physicist) is an open source codec (which stands for 'coder-decoder') released by the BBC. More...

E-Learning Reviews
I got a press release in my email about this site, which at first glance looks interesting but developing. The idea is that a group of reviewers is reviewing publications in e-learning. A good idea - something that has been some time in coming. More...

dscn6382-94
As you scan your morning feeds, your kitchen reports, "Your shortening would like to upload a recipe (yes,no,always upload content from Crisco). Note: this recipe got a thumbs up from your friend Brian" You click "yes" because you trust Brian and the RFID tag, which has connected with your home wireless network to make the requests, adds the URL and metadata to your home recipe library. More...

RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators
Newly updated, this resource has just been updated. A good place for those new to RSS to start. More...

Knowledge and Learning
Slides from my talk in Perth today in which I draw out a clear theory of knowledge and educe from that a theory of learning. Sketchy, obviously, the audio will help when it's available. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, October 11, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks
Text of the Buntine Oration, delivered to the at the Australian College of Educators and the Australian Council of Educational Leaders conference in Perth, Australia. MS Word version. This is the unpolished version; links and references will be added over the next few days, slides will be made available and an audio feed added.
"I had this vision, you see, that the use of learning objects would, in effect, make learning content seamlessly and effortlessly available not only to all students, but to all people in the world who wished to learn, and that the portability and reusability of learning objects meant that we could develop an educational environment where students were not marched in lockstep through a predefined curriculum but instead could have the freedom and capacity to explore the world of learning according to their own interests and their own whims. Learning, genuinely free and accessible learning, could be produced and shared by all.
"So what went wrong? I mean, it’s easy to say that the systems are too expensive, the learning too boring, the search too cumbersome, the reusable objects too not reusable. What matters here is that I be able to explain why the existing model is inadequate, and how it differs from the model that is worth emulating, the one that I have suggested, and now say explicitly, is the model instantiated by the World Wide Web itself.
"Order emerges out of networks because networks are not static and organized but instead are dynamic and growing. A network consists of a set of entities – called, variously, units or neurons, but which can be in fact anything from crickets to blog posts to bloggers. In a network, these entities operate autonomously and are only tenuously connected – as the slogan goes, small pieces loosely joined. They receive input from other entities to which they are connected, organize that input, and then pass it on – or as the slogan goes, ‘aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward’." By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, October 9, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Blogging Communities And The Knowledge Enterprise
It seems (to me at least) that every time something good comes along - like RSS and blogging - someone takes it and turns it into an 'enterprise version'. The lure of low hanging fruit is irresistable, I suppose, but there is something just wrong, in my mind at least, with the concept. Blogging worked fine before the enterprise, it will be broken after, plugged in as it will be is monitoring and reporting, link filtering, content standards and control, and more. More...

An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)
Nice article, with code samples in Perl (though it relies on a module called SWISH), explaining Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), two major implementations of web services. More...

Protecting Ourselves to Death: Canada, Copyright, and the Internet
"Ironically," wrotes the author, "while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital." What follows is a long analysis of copyright law in Canada with particular reference to the impending retification of the WIPO proposals. More...

CETIS Quarterly Newsletter
The second CETIS Newsletter has hit the streets, arriving in my email today, and although the formatting looks just awful in Firefox readers should bite the bullet, fire up Internet Explorer, and have a look. Author Wilbert Krann gets to the heart of things right away. More...