By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A New Solution for Electronic Transcripts
The solution to the problem of fraudulent transcripts, touted in this article as a growing problem, is not "a proprietary data translation engine" but rather an open transcript format that can be used by educational institutions and accessed (with appropriate permissions) by any software capable of reading the XML document. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Communities of Practice: The Role of Classification Schemes and Taxonomies
Interesting meander chronicling the trials of an instructor seeking learning materials for use on campus. I like the remark about 'tangental communications'. I disagree with the conclusion - that taxonomies are needed for threaded discussion lists - but I appreciated the journey. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration
In my paper Resource Profiles I talked about XML documents made up of XML formats specific to the resource being talked about. This has not been invented and is known to the wider community under the heading of 'microformats'. Examples include the 'rel' tags used in links (especially in Atom), XFN and similar personal metadata (hcards), embedded calendaring markup (hcalendar), and more. This article in an introduction to the concept. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RSS Feeds College Students' Diet For Research
Learning technology that was almost unthinkable just a few years ago is now everyday news in USA Today, as this story describing the use of RSS by students to keep up on their research illustrates. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Licenses, Features and the Open Source Community in Higher Education
Good presentation emphasizing not only the size of the e-learning market (about 30 billion USD (+/- 30%)) and the importance of open source in serving that market. The author emphasizes several times that open standards, rather than open source, will be key to accessing that market. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bill Gates Looks Ahead, Defends Software Security
The Chronicle's interview with Bill Gates is now on available on the free section of the site (it was behind the subscription barrier yesterday). For all that, it's a pretty tepid interview. Gates's view of e-learning seems to be students in class holding tablet computers. Three questions on security (oh yes, everything is fine) were followed by one on open source. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Internet at School
The latest Pew study is all over the internet. The main news is that "Teen use of the internet at school has grown 45% since 2000" and that they are more likely to use instant messaging than email. Though the telephone survey is of American teens only, it is usually repeated (for example here) without that qualification. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tags vs. Trusted Sources
Will Richardson contrasts the use of tags to find useful information with the use of trusted sources. "I've never felt like what I've subscribed to tag-wise at Technorati or del.icio.us has been all that helpful," he writes. But on the other hand, he gets a lot of good information from people he reads regularly. I am inclined to agree. More...