By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. PH.Dotcom
Article about academic blogging which, while it notes the paucity of academic bloggers, speaks positively about the potential benefit. What I liked was the description of why academics blog: to enjoy a freedom they cannot find in traditional academic writing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wired Campus Blog
I didn't realize this, but the Chronicle of Higher Education has quietly launched a blog. The first post dates from February but it is only in the last week or so that it has ramped up. Not all items link to Chronicle paid content (though some do, including an article about the random essay generator - a story so well covered one wonders why the Chronicle is charging for its version). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Carl Berger is Blogging!
D'Arcy Norman writes, "Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging!" This is good news, not so much because we get to read what he thinks (though this is no small bonus) but because he will now experience first-hand what we have been talking about all along, which could only mean good things. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. edublogs.org
James Farmer sets up edublogs.org, "a hub for edublogs." There's nothing there yet, so this is a link to the blog post. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Help with Blogging Assignments
The value of this post is in the comments. The author describes a blog writing assignment he is using - an assignment that is failing to generate the sort of response he is looking for. Several good suggestions have been offered already - you may have more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Beyond the Men's Club
A number of people sent me this link raising the question, "why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?" It isn't, of course, as any excursion beyond what we see reported in the media will reveal - roam through random LiveJournal blogs or random Blogger blogs for a few hours and you'll see. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Centered Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organisation
James Farmer weighs in with a nice post describing how aggregation networks foster communication in social networks such as intranets. The key, argues Farmer - and he is exactly right here, right in an important and subtle way - is that the networks formed through aggregation foster community in a different, and more effective, way that networks formed through structures such as category trees. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Learning Blogosphere
Discussion in two parts. Part 1 follows up on a project to build a distributed learning blogging community in a class last fall, including an interesting series of attempts to actually follow the conversation. Part 2 looks at the long tail phenomenon in class blog posts and looks at ways of improving the balance of participation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Online Universities Weblog
This is getting annoying in a hurry. I use PubSub to find content from a wide range of blogs; I subscribe to PubSub's custom RSS feeds in Bloglines. The Online Universities Weblog publishes an RSS feed which shows up in my PubSub subscription. So far so good. More...