By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Integration of Breeze and Captivate
If you're into Flash and Breeze, you'll like this announcement. Captrivate allows you to create a screencast; Breeze allows you to broadcast it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ConnectViaBooks
Peter West thought I might find this interesting and he was right. Associated with Amazon.com, ConnectViaBooks combines book lists with social networking, the idea being to put people together based on what they like to read. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Virginia Tech and Serebra Forge Agreement to Provide E-Learning Certification
Serebra provides the course content through its easyLearn system, Virginia Tech offers online registration, content review, and completion certificates, while Virginia-based Global Education Foundation and Global Work Force Development (GLOBAL) provides administrative support. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada Connects
From the email release: "Canada Connects has just launched a new web portal designed to deliver affordable elearning resources to Canadians." Early reviews circulating through the emailsphere are not favorable. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Challenging The Primacy Of Lectures: The Dissonance Between Theory And Practice In University Teaching
Almost nobody, it seems, believes in the instructivist model of learning - the presentation of material and the expectation (hope?) that it will be absorbed by osmosis. Most writers in the field support something like this: "learning environments should be student-centred, knowledge-centred, asessment-centred and community-centred." So why, asks the author, is the dominant mode of teaching at universities more like the instructionist and less like the constructivist? Too many factors inhibit change. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bloggers Need Not Apply
It's ironic to see this author warning about your blog making you look like an idiot without any warning about doing the same in a column for the Chronicle. That is probably why the article is published under a pseudonym. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RSS Contacts
This is a step in the right direction, but only a step. It recognizes (like FOAF and XFN) that social networking data ought to be distributed, in the form of personal RSS files, and not centralized and bound to a particular environment, as in Friendster and Orkut. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Metadata
This was intended to be a note to myself, partially to comment on discussion list metadata and partially to frame some throughts for my talk in Colorado in August. But it makes some points that bear wider consideration, and in particular, two principles of metadata: metadata for a given entity should never be stored in more than one place; and metadata for a given entity should not contain metadata for a second entity. By Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, July 7, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...