WebCT and Online Assessment: The Best Thing Since SOAP?
By SOAP the authors mean not web services but Student Online Assessment Program. This essay looks at what may be the best thing since then, the WebCT quiz application. Nice discussion of the evolution of SOAP and a nice chart near the middle of the essay comparing SOAP with the WebCT feature. More...

The Content Conundrum
A fun dialogue in the great tradition of gentle satire looking at some of the assumptions behind the idea of reusable learning objects. "Q: So, RLOs, where will they come from? A: Good question, and one that seldom gets asked. There's tacit agreement that you and I will be creating RLOs." There's some good information behind the links - the colour is subtle so be watching for it. More...

Extending the Web With Metadata Profiles
Profiles are, in a nutshell, a neat way of embedding XML-like information in webpages, such as the information you might include describing yourself in a FOAF file. More...

College Backs Off Wi-Fi Ban
A sign of the times - the students' own personal Wi-Fi networks were (supposedly) interfering with the university-run system, so the administrators' first reaction was to ban the student systems. Turns out, though, that they may not have the authority to do so. More...

The best Online Homework Help
The Teacher List author Pete MacKay opens the new school year with this article he authored listing the best homework help sites. More...

Go Fast. Go Cheap. And Let It Go Out of Control
Brian Lamb's presentation at the ITI conference in Utah in the form of a set of Wiki pages. There's a lot of content here surveying new technologies in learning, including blogs, wikis and RSS - hard to believe he got through most of it in his session. More...

Intranets Look Vainly to Knowledge Management
Fascinating, the vagueness you get when you attribute human qualities to non-human entities. By 'vainly' does the author mean 'with vanity' or 'in a futile fashion'? No matter. The author, responding to a recent Line56 column, advances the idea that knowledge cannot be captured. It's not an original criticism, but it's nicely put, if overstated. More...

Blackboard and MERLOT Broaden Learning Network
MERLOT is at it again, this time signing a deal with Blackboard. The good bit is this: "The first Blackboard Building Block to be released will be a portal module that uses RSS content syndication to aggregate news about and links to the learning resources most recently added to MERLOT." The less good (but not surprising) bit is this: "MERLOT will develop a Blackboard taxonomy within the MERLOT learning directory, making it easier for MERLOT users to identify Blackboard-specific training materials." Didn't we learn during the browser wars that vendor specific tags are a bad idea. More...

Logan, Utah
Photos from Logan, Utah, and mostly from my walk in the mountains the Sunday following the conference (I'm still not very good at conference photography, though I did get one nice picture of Grace Lin, who presented the OOPS Project along with Luc Chu. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, September 7, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Reusable Media, Social Software and Openness in Education
PowerPoint slides and the full MP3 audio version of my keynote at ITI in Utah. The abstract: "In the three themes described in the title of this paper there is a common thread, a tension between the producers of media, both online and traditional, and between the consumers of this media. Greater connectivity and greater capacity for content creation have given the consumers the capacity to produce their own media, and this poses what is deemed to be unacceptable competition to the producers, who find that their traditional modes of production, business models and distribution channels are threatened. More...