In a Flash, the Latest Fashion in Computing
It occurs to me that I mentioned flash memory in passing yesterday without really saying what it was. Fortunately, Bonnie Bracey sent this link to WWWEDU today providing an overview. More...

More Australia Photos
In the usual location (I won't be able to create proper galleries until I get home) are many new photos from Darwin, Alice Springs and Uluru, in Australia. I'm in Adelaide now, where it's cool and rainy - just like it was in the Australian Outback. Go figure. The new colour scheme is based on my outback experiences; the masthead is a composite of various Aboriginal cave paintings I photographed. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, September 28, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

My Birthday Red Egg to Her Birthday Party
Commentary on my talk in Adelaide. In the title item, Albert Ip illuminates my four ways the e-learning industry is wrong with a story of his own about eggs and birthdays. Scor Aldred launches a new blog into the world and links to his own presentation on blogs and wikis. More...

Learning Object Production and Implementation: UT Telecampus
The article appears to have an editing malfunction near the beginning, but stick with it as the people interviewed - Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of the University of Texas - offer some good insites on the practicalities of implementing learning objects learned during the course of a large scale course development project using learning objects. More...

NET*Working 2004 Program Now Online!
As the headline suggests, the Net*Working program is now online... you'll have to do some hopping around to find all the events, there's a lot there (a single plain-text page with everything would be very useful, but I couldn't find a link anywhere). I thought I was doing something on the 8th but apparently not. More...

Learning Objects: A Practical Definition
The September issue of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning has arrived and I am running two articles, beginning with this item by Rory McGreal, who leaps once again into the fray with a (nother) definition of learning objects. Once again, McGreal has me defining learning objects as "anything and everything" but has this time managed to catch the nuance of my position - "Whether something counts as a LO, depends on whether it can be used to teach or learn, and this can only be determined by its use, not by its nature." But he still disagrees with me. More...

Virtual training on show at NET*Working 2004
The Net*Working 2004 conference will be held online this year, and while organizers in this article are enthusiastic about the many new technologies that will be employed, I have noticed a certain amount of apprehension as to whether they will work. Certainly, my own experience with a wide variety of synchronous conferencing platforms has not been good. More...

A Virtual Visit to MoodleMoot Ireland & Glasgow Moodles Onwards
MoodleMoot is the name given to the proceedings of the Moodle users' conference - Moodle is an open source learning management system that is gaining traction in the educational community. More...

By Colleen Flaherty. History has seen the steepest decline in majors of all disciplines since the 2008 recession, according to a new analysis published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History. More...

A GMail-based Blog With 1000 MB of Entries
Some of the most entertaining work on the internet these days is being done around Google's new GMail service. Give people a gigabyte of storage and an application interface and who knows what you can do! One person has turned his email account into a file server. Another person has turned his email account into blog authoring software. This discussion on Slashdot raises the question: does Google mind? Hard to say. More...