The Educational Semantic Web
The discussion areas for this online book, The Educational Semantic Web, are now online. More...

Whither the Semantic Web
The future isn't enterprise systems, proprietary databases, web services, Java runtime engines, or standardized ontologies. That's not what the web was, that's not what RSS is, and that's not the future of online semantics. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, June 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

The Wide World of Wiki: Choosing a Wiki for an Element of a Fully Online Undergraduate Course
James Farmer provides a nice review of wiki software that can be used to support an online class (a wiki is essentially a website that allows any reader to chaneg the contents). More...

Web Users to Gain Creative Commons Access to the BBC
This came to me from a few sources: the BBC is licensing all of its content under Creative Commons. More...

Science.gov 2.0 Launches
This new version of the governmentwide Web portal for science and technology information is a significant improvement over the first. Still a federated search (which means searches may take, as the site says, 'up to 30 seconds'), the site has an improved search engine and now accesses 30 resource portals and 47 million pages in real time. More...

The Educational Semantic Web
I haven't had time to write summaries for each of the papers in this issue, though they certainly deserve that (maybe next week). But I don't want to delay announcement of this special issue of JIME, featuring some of the major writers in the field, including Diana Oblinger, Rob Koper, and yes, myself. More...

Why We Need Web 3.0
Gav Would, Medium, 2018/09/13
More and more, as Ethereum co-founder Gab Would says, we are seeing that "the internet today is broken by design." It is centralized, it is driven by "the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious," and it provides no defense against fake news, cyber-attacks and surveillance. Hence the need for what is being called web 3.0 (backed by a suite of applications called web3). More...

Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web
Zoë Corbyn, The Guardian, 2018/09/13
The web you thought you knew is getting ready for some major changes. "The proponents of the so-called decentralised web – or DWeb – want a new, better web where the entire planet’s population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance." DWeb, or Web 3.0 (as it's also called in today's OLDaily) is coming. More...

How you can make a progressive web app in an hour
ryanwhocodes, freecodecamp, 2018/09/10
OK, I spent way more than an hour on this. Be warned. So, a progressive web app (PWA) is a web page that functions offline as well as online, and is typically used on a mobile device. It does this by means of a 'service worker' that manages a local cache of static resources and intercepts calls to remote servers to cache results and use the cache is the dynamic results aren't available. More...

Restrictions Impeding Web-based Courses
Documentation of the results of two typical requests an instructor might make of a publisher while creating an online course. More...