By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students Forced to Carry RFIDs
It is, I suppose, no surprise to find the surveillance society being unrolled first in schools. What is troublesome, of course, is the inevitable drive to use a system that is intended to protect students as a means of controlling students. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Poking Around Weather via WAP/WML
I keep planning WAP / WML versions of this newsletter and Edu_RSS; I'm not sure how useful that woiuld be but I would like to provide the option. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs @ Middlebury College
Interesting description with links to a description of blogging in learning as used by Middlebury College in combination with a content management system (CMS). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Producing Social Network Environments
They told me my philosophy courses would never be useful, but this could have come straight from my metaphysics class: "People don’t exist in environments, they exist in themselves and their semilattice-esque relationships with other actors (communities, individuals, spaces, inanimate objects...)." Why is this important? When we are creating a learning system, we are creating a mechanism that allows people to interact with, to experience, and to learn from the world. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community Portals – The UK Experience. A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams?
I understand why the author would say this: "To increase the sustainability of portal projects there is a need to 'work towards establishing common frameworks that will enable applications and services, from different sources, to work together.'" After all, it is precisely that failure that accounts for the indifferent success of community portals, the 'field of dreams' scenario, where you build it, and they do not come. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google, Wikipedia and More
I was talking with Chouki the other day, and what I said was, "Wouldn't it be neat if we could take every page in Wikipedia, do an associative analysis of the contents of each of the million plus articles, and use clustering algorithms to create a genuine dynamic folksonomy, rather than the highly artificial (and hence, unstable) structures generated by tagging." His response was, well, you could do that, but you wouldn't need to analyze a million articles; a subset would do it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reading Program Didn't Boost Skills
When you spend $50 million on e-learning, you expect results. That's not what happened in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which purchased Pearson Education's Waterford Early Reading Program four years ago only to find after a study that the software didn't help, and sometimes hindered, student learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. edna-for-schools, 8 February
It's the start of another new school year in Australia and as teachers sit down to plan the new year they can't go wrong if they being with the EdNA newsletter, a fantastic resource that in the space of a few hundred words puts teachers in context, connects them to resources, and gives them something to think about. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Partnership Supports Open Source Publishing Software Development
This is the sort of model that should be encouraged and developed for e-learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Staff Online
Christian Spatzierer sent me an email yesterday inviting me to try his company's product, Staff Online, with an eye toward e-learning applications. The idea is that by clicking on a link on a web page you are put into a videoconference with a representative - which could be customer support, an instructor, a mentor, or a tutor. I tried the system, which is based on a Flash interface - this means I didn't install any software, didn't need to do anything, in fact. More...