By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LeMill
I've been meaning to find a hook to hang this link on for a while now, but it hasn't happened, so I'll just send you straight to LeMill without a whole lot of context. "LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. You can use the resources you find in your own teaching or learning. You can also add your own learning content to LeMill". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life: 20 Lessons
Interesting presentation that not only sketches the role of Second Life in learning but also maps it against a dozen or so other sites for features such as players' creative capacity or the site's emphasis on collaborative behaviour. Good links on this. There's a bit of a tendency to represent Second Life as the pinnacle of online virtual world achievement, but the observations are nonetheless worth a look. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Review of Learning Objects, A Moving Target
Without going headlong down the learning objects pathway, let me suggest this: "And, one key property is a Learning Object's ability to fully identify itself. Thereby, any object (or person) can send a message, 'What are you; what functionality do you have, how do we relate?'" This is a view that depicts learning objects as programs, and not content. Now - just for fun - take this view and compare it to OpenSocial, just below. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A 14-Year-Old Talks Educational Technology
Steve Hargadon writes, "To me, Arthus is not representative of most 14-year-olds, but is representative of the kind of independent, engaged, proactive, and self-directed learner we often think will thrive in the flattened and connected world of the Internet." Having read his posts, Arthus seems pretty typical to me, except, I suppose, his choice of topic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Information E/Revolution and A Vision of Students Today
Looking at the title of this post, and having in mind Tom Haskin's post on change, which I had just read, I bring to all who may want it (who, I admit, may be very few in number) a new word, based on the amalgam of those thoughts: ervolution - the endorsement of change, or change itself, as experienced by those who are not sure they want it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating a C|Net for Education
News of 1105 Media's acquisition of Education Plaza, which promises to be the 'CNet of Educational Technology' (I quite like CNet and have linked to them a lot over the years) but more to the point is a commentary on our field: "Our market is just completely broken. It is vendor driven and vendor controlled (and this, unfortunately even extends to Web 2.0, where it is all about repurposing whatever falls from the sky). I've never seen such unilaterally disempowered customers. This is, to a certain extent, due to legal concerns about handling RFP's and bidding, but it really goes beyond that. People literally seem afraid that Microsoft will retailiate against them if they talk to loudly about alternatives". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Anaheim 2007

There was no newsletter yesterday, so you didn't miss it. Today's comes to you from the AECT conference here in Anaheim, where the winds have abated but the smoke still lingers. The photo above was the scene from my hotel room window at 7:30 a.m. as the Sun rose behind the still burning Santiago fire near Santa Ana - you can see the smoke plumes from it. Stephen Downes, Flickr October 25, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Flickr]. More...