By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Glass[Edit][Delete]: EDU 2.0 Early Beta Launched, Graham Glass, etc. [Edit][Delete] August 15, 2006
Something to look at: "Teachers: find and share educational materials, assemble courses, manage classes, set and grade assignments. Students: study at your own pace, find educational materials, participate in classes, submit assignments, track grades ...and this is just the beginning..." This early beta only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Marie Jasinski[Edit][Delete]: Go Conative - Where There's Will, You're Away!, Best of the Australian Flexible Learning Community [Edit][Delete] August 14, 2006
Marie Jasinski weighed into a post today with a reference to this article, her explanation (and celebration) of connation. "Conation is derived from the Latin verb conari, meaning to strive! It refers to the act of striving, intentionality, of focusing attention and energy and acting with a purpose to achieve a goal. In other words, conation is about stickability, staying power, strength, stamina and survival." If you haven't seen this item before, it's well worth a look. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future: A Vision and Research Agenda, Computing Research Association. [Edit][Delete] November 2, 2006
Results of a study from several sets of workshops, released in 005. I found this report to be an interesting read but have to agree with Zhao Lin's comments in IFETS today: "Web-based educational research, particularly, in learning theory and technology, is a very promising solution to this situation of mutual limitations. However, neither the cyberinfrastructure report nor the above 2020 report pays sufficient attention to web-based educational research. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: Copying Own CDs 'Should Be Legal', Bbc [Edit][Delete]BBC [Edit][Delete] November 2, 2006
See, here's the deal. I can put 5,000 or so songs on my iRiver, so that's about $5,000 worth of music, should I ever fill it up. Now, were my $300 iRiver to cease functioning, or be lost, or dropped in a vat of oil, I would need to purchase all those songs again, unless I can copy my purchased songs. I have gone through three MP3 players already. Certainly, I am not prepared to repurchase the digital files each time. This is simple common sense. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mark Oehlert[Edit][Delete]: Education Map of the Decade, E-Clippings [Edit][Delete] November 2, 2006
Normally I would not link to this item, because the document Mark Oehlert links to, a graphic by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation called 'Map of the Decade' is released under strict copyright conditions and requires that you supply a (fake) name and email address to access. But it is a very good resource, despite the U.S.-centric approach, which produces some blind spots. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Snowden[Edit][Delete]: Communities of Practice, Cognitive Edge [Edit][Delete] November 3, 2006
I am very much in agreement with this post. Dave Snowden writes, "communities can evolve, but cannot be designed top down... you can not replicate the end point of an evolutionary process." He points to two disastrous approaches: "Creating an organisational template for communities of practice, with a full roll out plan, dedicated staff etc. etc. [and] Taking a paternalistic (or maternalistic approach) in which people are held to be children or kids needing help or assistance. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Understanding Learning Networks, Reprise, November 3, 2006
This is my last talk for a while, I think - I have no travel and no talks planned at all right now. This is a good thing - it will let me rest and reflect and even get some coding done. There are some changes coming to my work and my website which I need to prepare for as well. In the meantime, it was nice to have the time to explore the topic in some detail, and the very willing audience here at the Universite de Moncton was more than gracious. So here we have almost three hours of learning networks and where learning is going from here. PowerPoint Slides (almost the same as the ones from Spain) and MP3 Audio (28 megabytes, 2 hours, 45 minutes) (which hardly even resembles the other talk). [Tags: Online Learning, Networks, Podcasting]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson[Edit][Delete]: McLuhan, Del.icio.us and Miscellany, October 26, 2006
My problem is, I haven't accepted the modern age of the printing press. "'Authorship' - in the sense we know it today [...] was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. [...] Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content [...] and in this transmission, authorship was often lost". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Leslie[Edit][Delete]: The Future of... - Three Contrasting Views, EdTechPost [Edit][Delete] August 9, 2006
received an email recently that prompted me to look at my essay, The Future of Online Learning, written almost exactly eight years ago. Games, multimedia, conferencing - it's all there, as well as online communities, facilitators, even the emphasis on testing and personalization. I talk about instructional management systems, of course, but also talk about what happens when class and course based models are abandoned. How does my article compare to the three futures described here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Work in Progress - Invitation to Comment, Jisc [Edit][Delete]JISC [Edit][Delete] August 7, 2006
Page linking to a large collection of materials from the JISC Trust in Digital Repositories project, with an invitation to comment. Thus I spent my morning today.
Begin with The TrustDR Project: a plain-english description for project partners (all documents are in MS Word). It's a good overview with a nice set of references. See especially section 4. But readers should note some themes that permeate these discussions, themes that just don't ring right - the idea that computer scientists believe that "there is some 'magic bullet' type of solution to the task of running a repository," the assumption "that an institutional digital repository of learning objects is a form of digital library," and the idea that institutional top-down management is required to make repositories work. And it seems off that the athors would claim that "Google algorithms make extensive use of 'traditional' metadata to work their magic," which so far as I know is false (certainly the vast majority of web pages have no metadata). More...