By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LMS Pricing Trends (Installed Implementations)
According to this chart, prices have been dropping, especially at the lower number of users (a drop of 25 percent for 500 users). And I don't think the averages (like, say, $48K for 500 users) include the cost of open source LMSs like Moodle. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Roadmap to becoming a Solid Developer in 2019
Solid, GitHub, 2019/02/11
Solid, you may recall, is the project by Tim Berners-Lee and company to create a distributed social web. This page makes it clear just how difficult and complex that task is. It's a 'roadmap' to becoming a Solid developer - that is, it identifies and links to the different things you need to know. The 'basics' include identity, DOM manipulation, APIs and more, not to mention graph data and RDF. You'll also need package managers like Yarn or (Node.js) NPM. Then you can move on to React, a Javascript framework for dynamic web interfaces. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. TeacherTube
A bunch of people have mentioned TeacherTube recently - like YouTube, except for teachers. Some people have taken note of Mrs. Burk's 'perimeter rap' video - though I'm not sure 'chick' and 'nasty' are the most appropriate ways to describe what is really a nice video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Zenith Space Mission 2007
I always like stuff like this. Hosted by Yukon College, "This 12 hour space shuttle simulation is designed to give students an idea of what it might be like to be part of a shuttle crew or the Mission Control Team... On Tuesday, April 3, 2007 this Grade 6 class will blast off into space!" Virtually, of course. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kathy Sierra, the Private Public and the Anonymous
There's way too much reaction to the Kathy Sierra post to attempt to capture, though this blog is doing a pretty good job. I have several reactions. First, the real problem - I reiterate - is a society (and an A-list blogosphere) that has long tolerated such behaviour. Where was Stop Cyberbullying when Juan Cole was getting death threats? Where was Safer Internet Day when those really vile posts on Ann Coulter were making the rounds? And second, as Dave Winer writes, the mob mentality is getting out of control. They are tramping around looking for scapegoats - ban anonymous posting, they write, or shut down or block these websites. As though that would solve the problem. It won't. The problem is that it is still socially acceptable to demean women, still socially acceptable to casually propose violent acts, still socially acceptable to engage in character assassination, and still socially acceptable to attack certain minorities (you read Rageboy and you realize that he still thinks it's OK). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER Discussion Update...
Brian Lamb offers his own answerrs to recent questions on the nature of learning and open educational resources (OERs) and links in passing to the new OERderves blog. Cute name. "Even with the dramatic changes in the broader techno-cultural landscape in the past ten years," he asks, "how much has essentially changed with universities in the western world? Isn't it all too easy to imagine universities remaining essentially unchanged - or at least clinging to business as usual - ten, even twenty years from now?". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ELI Conference - Haptic Force Feedback On Learning
This is pretty neat - an interface device (like a mouse, only much more complex) that not only lets you control objects on the screen, but which responds with resistance as appropriate. It's the same basic technology as rumble-sticks but with more fine-tuned responses that merely on-off and intensity. Jeff VanDrimmelen says there's no reason not to have one now, as they're becoming mainstream. Well, I guess I'd wait for some applications to actually develop the interface. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Characteristics of High-Performance Personal Networks
Well the website's a bit wonky right now - it's a combination of some less than perfect code and getting slammed by search engines (if you get 1000 hits a day, 999 of them will be search engine hits - that's a real challenge for anyone writing software). (Or maybe it's a DOS - I 'killall' but then all the httpd threads start right up again... sigh). Ross Dawson attempts to identify what makes personal networks work well, and hits on a number of things familiar to readers of these pages - things like diversity and dynamism. The article also describes "six key behaviors that create energizing relationships" - things like "have and communicate a compelling vision", "seek and acknowledge quality contributions", "give genuine attention to people." Well - ok. But, it seems to me, if you do these things in order to create or cultivate a personal network, they will be hollow and strained. Rather, these activities are ends in themselves - and a personal network is just one of the things that grows out of them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Obsessed with Putting Ink On Paper
OK, in the end, this has nothing to do with online learning, has nothing to do with why I clicked on it in the first place, and in the end, is an advertisement. But what really strikes me about this piece - which is about software that writes musical notation - is the way the author is concerned about the details. Now I have just spent all day writing code and looking at some editing, which means I've spent all day being really picky about semi-colons and the proper reference of pronouns. Picky stuff which (to be honest) most people don't care about. But - and this article makes the point so nicely - the beauty is in the details (same with Harold Jarche's sailboat - it wasn't the 50K, it was the zillion hours spent making sure every board was exactly right). So that's worth passing along. Now - why did I click on this in the first place. More...