By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ODRL Creative Commons Profile Specification
If you want to express Creative Commons (CC) licenses in ODRL, this document explains how. In order to do this, a set of CC-specific tags were added to ODRL. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Identity Gang
Link to discussion and resources produced by the clique at Berkman. You'll find some good stuff here, including a link to Kim Cameron's famous Laws of Identity paper, LID, identity commons, and more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Advertising Invades Textbooks
David Bollier gets to the heart of the problem: "I can hardly wait until Microsoft starts advertising in computer science textbooks; Ford pitches its SUVs in forestry school books; and professors start wearing corporate logos on their herringbone jackets like tennis stars and Nascar drivers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Let the Experiment Be Made
The author of this column argues against professors resisting online learning by saying, as the title suggests, let the experiment be made. After all, he argues, "The slippery-slope scenario says less about online education than it does about the lack of trust that exists between faculty members and administrators." Fair enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Big Fish
Not really about online learning, but if you want to add to your knowledge of internet lore, this longish history of the magazine website, suck.com, is worth a read. Started with (secret) backing from Wired, Suck emerged in the halcyon days that also saw the births of Slate and Salon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Infrastructure of Sharing in the Commons
Everyone is talking about things like blogs, Flickr, Wikipedia and the like, notes the author. "What makes all of this possible is the emergence of an infrastructure for sharing in the commons." What this boils down to is a combination of several key elements: the emergence of open source, open standards, and especially XML, "online tribes" (such as hackers) that take sharing as a core virtue, political movements that advocate the same, peer-to-peer distribution of resources, and business models that make them feasible. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is It a Wiki? A Floor Wax? A Dessert Topping?
After you read Brian Lamb's article, take the time to visit Tiddly Wiki for a bit. As you look more closely, it will become more and more amazing - an entire wiki can be a single file. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community Plumbing in Action: The Story of BEAT and the Campus Commons
This is a very good paper outlining the development of BEAT (the Business, Education, and Applied Technology program, which is an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional program that takes an applied, integrated approach to IT training) and the Campus Commons at UPEI. There's a lot going on in this paper, so read closely, but the core for me is the conceptual view of a self-organizing academic community and the key lessons: adopt an open strategy, encourage and allow freedom, attract a diversity of members, allow emergent communities to grow, and take an applied and integrated approach. More...