By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unattributed[Edit][Delete]: iTunes U, Apple [Edit][Delete]Apple [Edit][Delete] February 1, 2006

[link: 6 Hits] OK, this sounds like a good idea: make university classes, seminars and lectures available as audio feeds. Except that it's iTunes, which means you have to take the Apple iTunes pill (or, as the website says, except variable results on other players). There's obviously also a strong commercial component to this as well, which pretty much cuts out the service for those who need it most. Or as Miguel Guhlin says, "iTunes and Windows Media Player: Two sides of the same coin - Tyranny." Don't be lulled into the same fallacy with audio content as so many were with web-based content. There's no golden rainbow out there (except maybe for a select few big name institutions, and even that's iffy). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Get the PDFs – Google Search to Google Folder
Tom Woodward, Bionic Teaching, 2019/01/31
This is the sort of thing that should be easy but that is (for no good reason) hard. "Is there a way to automatically get the links from the search linked (here) into a spreadsheet? Then, from there, is there a way to automagically get the pdf files into a Drive folder?" Why yes, yes there is, which is why I'm passing this along. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Vox Media is acquiring The Coral Project
Sara Fischer, Axios, 2019/01/23
The Coral Project is "provides newsrooms with tools and technology to better manage their commenting sections." It's used by numerous newsrooms, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Australia's Fairfax Media, and others. This is not the first of Mozilla's open source projects to be spun-off. Last August its Backpack product was transferred to Badgr (itself the end result of a spin-off project involving Concentric Sky). According to the report, Vox will continue to operate Corel as an open source project. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Great Google Hangouts Shutdown begins October 2019
Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 2019/01/23
In an announcement yesterday Google laid out the timeframe for shutting down Google Hangouts. To be clear, what's being shut down is the chat system. "Hangouts—which Google has recently retconned to 'Hangouts Classic'—is Google's most popular messaging app of all time. Ars Technica reports, "Hangouts Classic (the popular one) is shutting down. Today, Google announced the shutdown begins October 2019, when the company says it will 'start retiring' Hangouts Classic for GSuite customers. When, precisely, the shutdown happens for consumers is still up in the air. More...