By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Polytechs Migrate to Moodle
Short article describing the adoption of Moodle, an open source learning management system, by eight Polytechs in New Zealand. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Dog's Breakfast: Roles and Responsibilities for Managers in the Cyber Era
This is the wiki version of the transcript from my talk last September at Sunshine Coast, Australia. In this talk I take my Nine Rules for Good Technology and apply them to managers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CMS interoperability?
Good overview of Content Management System (CMS) interoperability, a problem that will continue to grow as the number of CMSs increases. The author notes, "there still needs to be a common standard for the information itself, if meaningful interoperability is to be achieved. It is here that the difficulties arise, due to the lack of any consensus standards in this area." Quite right, and this is the one area of online learning standards development that has puzzled me - where have IMS, SCORM and the others been on a specification for learning objects themselves. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Central Queensland University’s Course Management Systems: Accelerator or Brake in Engaging Change?
Think about this: "Nearly 45 percent of the respondents believed that the university has implemented Blackboard as an enterprise system as a way to place additional controls on teaching and learning." This appears in the middle of this fascinating article contrasting teleological (or goal-based) and ateleological (or process-based) development methodologies (where 'development' may refer to design, delivery, learning...) and correspondingly centralized and decentralized processes. More...