By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: The CAMEL Project: Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e-Learning, Jisc [Edit][Delete]JISC [Edit][Delete] October 23, 2006

Just got this by email: JISC is distributing a booklet on the CAMEL project. "CAMEL is short for Collaborative Approaches to the Management of E- Learning. CAMEL set out to explore how institutions who were making good use of e-learning and who were collaborating in regional lifelong learning partnerships might be able to learn from each other." Um, well, OK. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Darryl K. Taft[Edit][Delete]: Flapjax Simplifies AJAX Development, EWeek [Edit][Delete] October 23, 2006
William Langley from IRAP sent over this link. At first I was sceptical - do we need another computer language, particularly one with the exact same syntax as Javascript? Well - maybe. Flapjax (written in Python) is a server side compiler that parses and processes AJAX requests, thus creating a very fast and efficient interactive web page (presumably even on slow computers). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Groups vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues, September 29, 2006
It's Saturday morning as I write right now from my hotel room in Wellington, New Zealand, and as I try to check some reservations and flight details and try once again to upload some audio before I leave these shores and these climes for home I am probably not to be trusted with my observations, thoughts and feelings forged not only in the last week or so of sleep-deprived madness in New Zealand but in that sunny Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt, the veldt of the Kruger, the townships of the South Cape, the hills of Lesotho.
Such adversity often brings out the best in me, and even as I agonize over the conditions of its creation, the fired-up conversations, the late nights, the drawn out arguments, the glares across the room, the harshly worded email messages, the flames, the phone calls, the angry shouts in hotel lobbies, crammed shuttle buses, salt-slicked ferry decks, even as I agonize over all this, some part of me, somewhere, is asking, "why?" (this would be right next to the part asking "why me?") and in some deep sense I am trying to put some sort of order to all this.
It was beautiful, brilliant, sad, heartfelt, desperate, angry, pleasing, painful and at long last far too short and far too long. And so out of all this came this talk, which I am so pleased with, at least, before having heard it (I'll listen to it on the airplane), because whatever the words I uttered actually said, they were genuine, they were well-forged, they were mine, they were ours, they belong to Leigh and Rose, they belong to Tony Carr and to Nico Baird, they belong to the cattle-boys of Lesotho and to the people who weren't here today but who have always been here.
The audio of my talk, I think, reflects all of this and more - please, if you listen to nothing else from me this year, listen to this, because everything I write comes from the heart, and this is as close to it as anyone is ever likely to get.
So while I offer up my thanks to Leigh for organizing this last stage of my journey, I am still not sure whether I would ever do it again... and yet, even so, I am looking at plans for next time, on a Canadian train, perhaps, in a Brazilian minibus, who knows? To the Southern Hemisphere: hail and farewell! And know that your skies will always be in my eyes, your people always in my mind, and a desire to return always in my future. [Tags: Canada, Podcasting] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Steve Hargadon[Edit][Delete]: Interviews with Maddog Hall and John Selmys, K12 OpenSource Webcasts [Edit][Delete] September 28, 2006
From Steve Hargadon: "This week I've spoken to Jon "maddog" Hall and John Selmys about Free and Open Source Software in schools... Maddog (and he told me only his mom calls him Jon) is the Executive Director of Linux International, and even though I was struggling with a flu bug, he did a great job of succinctly communicating the value of Free and Open Source Software in education." Note that this link opens an MP3 audio recording. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Groups and Networks, September 25, 2006

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Language tags in HTML and XML, W3C [Edit][Delete] September 23, 2006
Some changes in the way XML and HTML declare languages; these may also impact learning object metadata (LOM), which has always been bad at handling language (prefacing each sentence with a 'language string' tag). As for me, well, I am happy, I am really tired of choosing between en-US and en-GB. I don't speak either language, I speak Canadian English. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alexander Hayes[Edit][Delete]: Auckland : FLNW On The Streets, September 23, 2006

I like this: "Whilst out and about on Auckland streets today I bumped into a Maori Elder busking so I thought I'd sit down and have a chat about whats happening with young people from his perspective. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Brandon Hall Network, September 23, 2006
Brandon Hall has discovered social networking, and so naturally, has built a social network site that is, as they say, "Myspace.com meets LinkedIn." There is, the email advertisement said, currently no cost to join - but of course, there will be eventually. I guess we can expect special events available only to members advertised around the net. You may wonder why I didn't build something like this - I could easily have done so, and I certainly knew about this sort of approach several years ago. Simply: it's the wrong approach. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Wikipedia:School and University Projects, Wikipedia [Edit][Delete] September 21, 2006
Useful page on Wikipedia that provides advice, examples and templates to assist in the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. "An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educative but also makes it more interesting ("the world gets to see my work"), probably resulting in increased dedication. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tim Grant[Edit][Delete]: Rendell Launches Program to Put Laptops in Classrooms, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [Edit][Delete] September 21, 2006
The governor of Pennsylvania is announcing "the start of a three-year, $200 million program to furnish high school classrooms with laptop computers and wireless Internet access." This is good, but there's something weird about the idea of "a laptop computer on every desk" - shouldn't laptops be associated with individual students. More...