By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ida Takes Tea
Another new ed tech blog, Ida Takes Tea, which launched last week, is written by Catherine Howell, who works for CARET, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, at the University of Cambridge, UK. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Turning fantasy into a reality that helps others
Coverage in a Taipei newspaper of Luc Chu's Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS), which is translating MIT's OpenCourseware into Chinese. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Music Lovers 'Frustrated'
There ought to be some lessons learned from the chorus of complaints being raised by Britons being subjected to DRM problems in their downloaded music. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Continuous Environmental Scan: Where Do You Get All Your Ideas?
This article describes almost exactly the process I use in my own work, so (naturally) it is well worth passing along. What I like is the author's reference to skill and practice because it suggests (accurately) that with some work it can be done by anyone willing to put in the effort. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Network Connections
Examines the phenomenon of social networking with an emplhasis on three casae studies: Friendster, Ryze and Meetup. Good summary of the theory behind social networking and a nice history relating the phenomenon to its origins in MUDs, Usenet and IRC. The case studies of the three sites are accurate and to the point. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The New Gatekeepers
Nice article on the 'new gatekeepers' of the blogging world - the so-called 'A-list' bloggers who draw thousands of readers and dozens of links every day. The big spike, as I characterized them in a recent presentation, these gatekeepers instantiate the very properties of the mainstream they are supposedly displacing - appearance over substance, mutual reinforcement, polarization, and herd mentality. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Gift Economy
Dave Pollard writes, "The Gift Economy offers us a means to learn, to understand, to take charge, and to change our world. It is a natural economy, steeped in millions of years of pre-civilization human culture and the culture of all life on Earth. If enough of us embraced it, the modern 'market' economy, built on the faulty and inhuman foundations of inequality, scarcity, false quantification of value, and acquisition, could not survive." In this thus far I agree, and in what follows he provides a pretty good overview. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Knowing When to Log Off
Well, this bit (the last line in the story) is true: "You're not being disloyal to progress," he said, "by picking and choosing the kind of technology that best fits your needs." The premise is that campus computing is contributing to information overload, and that the solution is to turn off the computer once in a while. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Collaboration and Content Creation
James Richardson briefly describes the content of a briefing from Microsoft on their Learning Gateway Framework. He notes, "It's SIF compliant which means it could plug right into our Student Information System and deliver some pretty interesting tools to teachers and students." Microsoft has a large learning program, but they haven't been very good at getting the information out. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Let Educational Systems Talk
Good background on the new IMS General Web Services spec describing the three major scenarios described and what they mean in general terms. Despite the heroic effort to make arcane topics accessible I think average readers will still find it too technical. More...