By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. JISC Conference
Update on a "pleasant day" at a JISC conference (how about that!) with a link to a slide show about the Open Athens project. "End-user needs will push us down a user-centric identity management road... institutions will need to operate across multiple access management federation". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. BBC Jam... Good News for... Who?
The closure of BBC Jam continues to reverberate. John Connell writes sarcastically, citing publisher glee at the announcement, "Good news for British educational publishers' - but sod the kids who will benefit from BBC Jam. Good to know where your priorities lie!" Seb Schmoller wants more usage data... "To see Jam at all you needed to register, so not much can be read into the fact that 170,000 user accounts on Jam had been created." And Connell again looks at the actions that might be taken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Unanticipated Consequence of the $100 Laptop
Well. "One NJ computer coordinator told me that a local school board heard about the $100 laptop and has decided not to buy any new computer hardware until laptops cost $100 in the United States. Now that should really scare the domestic computer industry!" Probably apocryphal. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Questions and Answers On Personal Learning Environments
The concept has been dragging its heels a bit recently but continues to be (in my view) interesting. "There is always a space for innovative, well thought out experiments in developing new applications. And who knows, PLEX may turn out to be a great tool. I suspect, though, it is more a proof of concept and research tool, than an application designed for mass use. More...