By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jonathan Kozol: Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid, September 21, 2005

Scathing account of the continuing segregation in American schools (you can draw your own parallels on a worldwide basis). The author concludes, "The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of 'what works,' no matter the enthusiasm with which they're elaborated, is not going to change this. The use of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated schools is not going to change this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. J.D. Lasica: Citizens' Media Gets Richer, Online Journalism Review September 20, 2005

Citizens' media - that is, media created by citizens, rather than by professional journalists or media specialists - is moving beyond text-based blog posts to include increasingly sophisticated audio and visual content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brian Lamb: Permissions, Paperwork, and Other Sordid Details, Abject learning September 20, 2005

Ubuweb is hurting artists, say the lawyers and businesspeople who want to shut the file-sharing site down. "One complaint read 'Kenneth Anger is penniless and living in a shack, yet you are making his films available for free and taking money away from him?' To which we reply: if the current system of avant-garde film distribution was working so well, why would the great artist Kenneth Anger be living in a shack and not a mansion? Is this really a system to hold on to?" meanwhile, Tech BC is no more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Charles L. Slater: What Does It Mean To Be an Educated Person?, September 19, 2005

Is this list right? I mean, it sounds like part Rudyard Kipling and part Robert A. Heinlein. And while those authors resonate with me, I will nonetheless probably never be a musician or an althlete, my poetry is best kept private, and I will certainly never subscribe to the simple moral theory suggested by the author. And it seems to me that an educated person not only knows how to lead, but also how and when and why to follow as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Associated Press: Firefighter Site Collects Stories, Wired News September 19, 2005

I actually suggested something like this when I spoke to the Canadian Association of Police Educators last June. I cited the experience of military personnel trading stories in online forums rather than relying on mission briefings. Now they have a template to work from. I also suggested that such a site would become wildly popular with the non-police public as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. James Torio: Blogs: A Global Conversation, September 15, 2005

Pretty nice Master's Thesis on blogs, the business of blogs and blogging as conversation. While it doesn't really break new ground (the survey, in which I think I participated, adds very little), and while the range of resources consulted could be wider, the essay nonetheless offers a good introduction to the topic and is written in an engaging and well-informed tone. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Gordon: Transient Identity, September 15, 2005

According to the author, "the concept of transient identity comes in to play when the ownership of personal identity is transferred back to the individual." It is transient because it is identity fixed at a certain point in time - the last time user info was entered into a website registration, for example. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Karen Rivedal: Can Public Universities Stay Public?, September 14, 2005

I have long maintained that the university crisis will occur as if overnight, after building up over a period of a number of years, a crisis created as legislators decline to fund an increasingly expensive and inefficient system of learning. This article notes one more element in the build-up - the overnight crisis isn't here yet, but it is getting closer. More...