By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CMS interoperability?
Good overview of Content Management System (CMS) interoperability, a problem that will continue to grow as the number of CMSs increases. The author notes, "there still needs to be a common standard for the information itself, if meaningful interoperability is to be achieved. It is here that the difficulties arise, due to the lack of any consensus standards in this area." Quite right, and this is the one area of online learning standards development that has puzzled me - where have IMS, SCORM and the others been on a specification for learning objects themselves. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. BlogPulse Conversation Tracker
Will Richardson reports on the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, a system that combines discrete weblog posts into a coherent conversation. Here, for example, is a somewhat disjointed conversation arising out of BloggerCon. Or another one on the Kryptonite bike lock saga. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Homegrown Single Sign On at UM - St. Louis
I enjoyed this presentation on the various iterations of a single sign-on system at a university (I loved Phase II - you have a single user ID, but you still have to log on to each application separately - which led immediately to Phase III). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brian Lamb, Learning Objects, Wikis, Flickr, RSS-- They Wanted it All (No Fooling)
As Alan Levine writes, "we got some good things going here." Brian Lamb is dishing out learning chaotic style and people are eating it up. Good presentation summary with numerous links to resources, wiki pages and other arcania. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Carl Berger is Blogging!
D'Arcy Norman writes, "Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging!" This is good news, not so much because we get to read what he thinks (though this is no small bonus) but because he will now experience first-hand what we have been talking about all along, which could only mean good things. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Communication Theories
Nice list of dozens of communication theories, each summarized in an accessible capsule description. Some old favorites, such as Medium theory and Network theory. One thing that would have improved this collection would have been links to online versions of the primary literature. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Remembering the BBS Scene
Some time while working with Athabasca University in the late 80s I set up a Maximus Bulletin Board Service (BBS) and called it Athabaska BBS, the intent being to support my telephone tutoring through electronic means. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Annotated New York Times
This site is a nice example of the use of RSS as a content aggregator combined with citizen journalism - or punditry, at least. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A New Hope for cc.edu
David Wiley is floating the idea of a Creative Commons Education license again, this time returning to the idea of rebranding the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license as the Education license, an idea that was rejected by Creative Commons when it was floated in October, 2003, but is viewed more favorably today. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. edublogs.org
James Farmer sets up edublogs.org, "a hub for edublogs." There's nothing there yet, so this is a link to the blog post. More...