RDF Calendar to Ical
Still on the subject of RSS and calendars... this page is written in Japanese, but there are short summaries in English as well as RDF code. It describes an RDF version of iCalendar (aka iCal), the non-XML calendar format standard. More...

News Maps
Interesting application that takes top stories linked to by bloggers and sorts them according to their popularity, then displays them as a map on a web page. More...

RSS Calendar
Finally, an alternative to pre-XML garbled calendar formats. The RSS 1.0 Events module has been kicking around in pre-dev mode for a while now. But now we have RSS calendar. Oddly, the RSS calendar doesn't use the proper RSS format (mostly because readers can't yet read it). More...

I follow my links from time to time on Technorati and I am surprised to find many quality blogs that have received no attention; as Technorati says, "zero links from zero sources". This special issue is attempt to redress that imbalance, to highlight some worthwhile blogs that are worth reading and linking to.

By Stephen Downes
August 1, 2004. More...

Making Syndicated Resource Feeds Fit for Human Beings
There's a lot more that needs to be said along these lines, but let me say for now that Derek Morrison is on the right track when he talks about styling XML so it can be read in a browser. More...

Alt-i-Lab
I have numerous comments about the material presented at this important conference, most of which I read last night, but the expression of these will have to wait until I can do them justice. In the meantime, this main link leads you to the IMS summary of the event. See also Raymond Yee's Wiki. Scott Leslie also provides numerous links. From the Alt-i-Lab Forum I would like to highlight especially Robby Robson's (unfortunately incomplete) discussion of digital rights as well as the White Paper Plenary Presentation. More...

Barbarian Inventions
I think there's a theme. There may be a theme. But don't spend time looking for one; it's not written that way. It's about newspaper registration, choice and cyberspace, unshaken hands and cellphones, Dreyfus, and why people seem intent on telling us what we should read and learn, how we should do so, and that we are, in effect, barbarians. More...

UKeU - Peeling the Onion - layer 2
Derek Morrison's dissection of the UKeU hearings was pre-empted by the release of the official (uncorrected) transcripts of the hearings, but I'm sure the official version doesn't capture the testiness of the exchange as well as this summary. More...

Learning Material Repositories - Rafts or Battleships? - Part 2
Carried over from Part 1, this article looks at the incredibly high barrier to entry to e-learning technologies and what to do about it. More...

Spiral Dynamics and Education
Marcus Barber responded to my Vygotsky link yesterday with a longish email, which I appreciated, and a link to this presentation. It's a longish PDF (a format my distaste for which he acknowledged) describing an off-shoot known as spiral dynamics. The bulk of the paper is devoted to dividing learners into six colour-coded groups, ranging from the deferential purples to the lone wolf reds. More...