By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education
The findings of this report may appear obvious, but count the number of institutions that do not meet these criteria for success and you have a good account of the widely reported 'failure' of online learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. (My) 7 Guidelines for Effective Corporate e Learning
Good set of guidelines which should form at least a framework of a corporate e-learning strategy -- or a corporate learning strategy in general. Know any managers who could use this advice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Emerging Perceptions
"Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs," writes David Miller, "must trust that it will be recognized as such." And those who wish to see meaningful content in blogs can do little more than to subscribe to it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Learning Blogosphere
Discussion in two parts. Part 1 follows up on a project to build a distributed learning blogging community in a class last fall, including an interesting series of attempts to actually follow the conversation. Part 2 looks at the long tail phenomenon in class blog posts and looks at ways of improving the balance of participation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pedagogy-Agnostic Standards and a Much Needed Rant
Commentary on David Wiley's post from yesterday. On automation, Terry Anderson asks, "how many people would prefer to use a human teller at a bank – especially one with a long linup in front of it, compared to using an ATM." Imagine, though, the ATM being required to support all banking functions, not only simple withdrawals, deposits and fund transfers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CCL Calls for Expressions of Interest
The Canadian Council on Learning, introduced here last week, has issued a call for expressions of interest to create the five knowledge centres described in its project plan: Adult Learning in Atlantic Canada; Early Childhood Learning in Quebec; Work and Learning in Ontario; Aboriginal Learning in the Prairies, Northwest Territories and Nunavut; Health and Learning in British Columbia and Yukon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen's Web Themes
So anyhow, after working on the OurMedia site I was feeling pretty comfortable with CSS, so I decided to redo the website. But I am also very lazy and have tired of rotating my theme every few months. So I set up a system that lets me easily create new themes, and which handles theme selection and rotation automatically. Click on the link to visit my website; you'll be greeted with a random theme. Click on the [Theme] link to rotate themes, or on [View Themes] to select from the list (the link is under the picture on the right). Not the neat thing about this is that you can use my random themes too - check out the sample here (notice it's a completely different site). Here's a template you can use on your website. This is all experimental, so please let me know if you have problems with it. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 22, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. JotSpot
JotSpot is an online wiki application (currently in beta) that can be used by anyone to set up their own wiki. There are some very nice features: a nice WYSIWYG page editor, the capacity to email content to a page, and a set of applications that can be plugged in to pages. Great stuff. As an example of JotSpot in action, see Lawrence Lessig's communal rewriting of Code and Other Laws on a JotSpot wiki. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DfES publishes new e-Strategy
Link and analysis of a new strategy paper in Britain, DfES's Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. winning through worst practices
OK, I've never published a book, not one that you can find in the discard bin at least, and I don't know anything about Chinese subs in San Francisco, but it seems to me that Highbeam Research deserves props for actually getting blogging and I sort of wish I had a job like RageBoy's. More...