By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Billion Essays
Technorati this week passed the one billion link mark, a number that causes databases to groan and commentators to stare in awe. Will Richardson: "One. Billion. Pieces of Writing. You can't deny the power of that." 8,586 of those are mine - the total number of OLDaily posts. Edu_RSS, meanwhile, has just passed the 90,000 link mark. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Case for Creative Commons Textbooks
This is a crime, isn't it? "University of California students now spend 40 percent more on textbooks than they did six years ago." This tells us what to expect from commercial publishers of educational content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Duke Puts Restrictions on Free iPod Program
Results are in from the Duke iPod experiment and while the devices will be used again next year, things will be different. This year the university handed out the devices to all students; next year they will be handed out only to students enrolled in courses that will use them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Podcasting and Vodcasting
A definitive white paper, this essay begins with definitions of podcasting and vodcasting, explains how it works, outlines the skill sets required, and lists a number of potential applications. There's enough information in here to enable most people to learn how to podcast, and yet the writing is clear enough to allow non-technical people to follow the description. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Golden Swamp
Judy Breck, who wrote the Small World Network Primer I listed yesterday, writes today to let me know that she relaunched her blog, Golden Swamp, about a week ago (the archive lists posts from April, 2004). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creative Archive Licence Group
Seb Schmoller sends along this link to a new licensing scheme launched in Britain. Pretty clearly modeled on Creative Commons (though you won't find that on the site anywhere, or at least, I couldn't find it), the license offers rights to content created by the BBC, Open University, and other British public institutions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mainstream Media Meltdown
Many people have scoffed about predictions that the internet would mean the end of traditional media. Even as journalism has been given a rough ride by a horde of fact-checking bloggers pundits have continued to hold that the media themselves are not in jeopardy. Well, the end is coming, and it's not just creeping forward, it is steamrolling. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Collaboration and Content Creation
James Richardson briefly describes the content of a briefing from Microsoft on their Learning Gateway Framework. He notes, "It's SIF compliant which means it could plug right into our Student Information System and deliver some pretty interesting tools to teachers and students." Microsoft has a large learning program, but they haven't been very good at getting the information out. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. NCQ Talk
I never link to content from Learning Times because of their login requirement - not simply because readers get enough spam, but also because I have long since forgotten my userid and password (who can keep track of hundreds of accounts?). So it's a bit of a surprise (and possibly temporary) to find this content available on the free and open non-spam internet: NCQ stands for 'Nerd - Canadian - Quaker' and consists of a set of biweekly podcasts along with some supporting documentation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching as Performance in the Electronic Classroom
Interesting argument looking at the rights associated with online courses through the lens of a contrast between two models of the course, one depicting the course as object, as a static body of text and image and organization, and the other depicting the course as performance. The battle over rights in the educational context is in this light less a battle over money(except in the eyes of the administration) but rather a battle over meaning. In the former (and this is my interpretation of the argument) the meaning of a course is determined through intention: it is what the author wrote about. More...