By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Charter Threatens Parents With Lawsuit
One of the advantages of charter schools, we are told, is that they enable direct parental input. Another is that they take advantage of the free market to allow free and informed choice. But Charter Schools USA has nullified both advantages with a single action recently with the sending of a Cease and Desist notice to a group of parents voicing their concerns about the school in an online forum. We need to remember that when private enterprise takes over our normal rights and freedoms are abrogated. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Means Just That
Scott Leslie levels some criticism at an unnamed open source learning object repository, pointing out quite reasonably that if it won't release its code, it cannot be called open source. I am inclined to agree and can name three projects off the top of my head that could fit his description. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Software in Schools
The long-awaited BECTA report advocating the use of open source in schools has now been released. The report, kept under wraps because of the British election, was nonetheless widely discussed in the blogosphere. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laptop Theft Prompts a Student-ID Shift at Oklahoma State U.
According to this article, staff at Oklahoma State are scrambling to implement a new student ID system after a laptop containing 37,000 student social security numbers was stolen from the school's career services department. University officials can lament now, but we have to ask, what were these records doing on a laptop in the first place. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My First (sloppy) ScreenCast
Alan Levine experiments with screencasting and is successful. Even better, he has provided instructions for the rest of us. You can view his screencast at his link. And also, you can see what I produced after following his instructions, made with Windows Media Eccoder, which recorded the screen, and SwishVideo, which converted it to Flash. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Enabling Mobile Learning
I was on the fence about this item but after mentioning it in my screencast (see below) I guess I should include it. This is a good article; I was on the fence only because I'm not sure mobile learning is a special category worthy of special consideration. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Formalizing Informal Learning
The title of this article is enough to make me wince but over the authors talk about creating supports for informal learning in the workplace rather than just hoping it happens. What needs to happen, they write, is that informal learning needs to be integrated into formal learning in the sense that it should be tied to measurable performance metrics. Of course, this isn't the point of informal learning at all - but I can see the point. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Database Will Hold the Mirror Up to 'Hamlet,' Gathering Every Commentary on the Play
This is pretty neat. Four centuries or so of criticism of the Shakespeare play Hamlet have been compiled into a database so that, for any line in the play, you can read what every commentator throughout that time has said about it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sailing to the Future: Infographics in the Internet Era
I love stuff like this - and, I might add, it's one of the few items I've seen where the use of PDF is appropriate. Though it's a hefty download (21 megabytes, zipped) it's not a deep or difficult read. Mostly, it stresses the importance of infographics, though by examining some Spanish case studies, is also able to cast light on the process. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ajax and Weblogs
I've mentioned Ajax before; this item is a follow-up with a nice example, complete with code. The author described the use of Ajax - a set of Javascripts used to manage interactive web pages - to parse and display XML files on this home page. More...