By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine[Edit][Delete]: Still Head Scracthing at Technorati, Cogdogblog [Edit][Delete]CogDogBlog [Edit][Delete] July 18, 2006
The A-List blogosphere has been remarkably quiet about this, and people keep quoting Technorati State of the Blogosphere figures uncritically, but Alan Levine is quite right to question the aggregator's credibility. I also do my own ego-surfing and have wondered about the mysterious changes in ranking, inconsistent numbers of links, and just plain weirdness (like jumping from "19 posts in the last 7 hours" to "19 posts in the last 5 days" as happened as I typed up this item, a span of about 5 minutes). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Cormier[Edit][Delete]: educationbridges.net - An Elgg for Teacher collaboration, July 18, 2006
Another new online learning community. Dave Cormier writes, "Alex and Arvind have set up an elgg at educationbridges.net. Go sign up. Join the party." That's all very fine, but when I see things like that, I always ask, "What's wrong with what I am doing here?" The point is, these communities always want me to go there - but then my comments are spread all over the net under different identities. I want to stay here - if an ELGG wants my comments, why can't it pull them from a (filtered?) RSS feed, and if it wants me to read the comments of it's members, why can't it send (via an API?) a comment. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mark Morton[Edit][Delete]: Evidence of the efficacy of Active Learning, EDUCAUSE Blogs [Edit][Delete] July 18, 2006
No doubt people will enjoy this. The author writes, "I reviewed a number of studies of the efficacy of Active Learning, extracted the most salient passages, and pulled them together into a single document." Not that many examples, but how many quotes do you need like this. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: TED Talks, July 13, 2006
I spent the afternoon listening to these talks (instead of preparing slide decks (bad Stephen, no cookie!)). Al Gore's talk was great ("Put yourself in my position..." he says, to general laughter). Majora Carter's talk was passionate and motivational. And Tony Robbins was a lot more lucid - and correct - than I had anticipated would be the case. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alfred Thompson[Edit][Delete]: Thoughts About the $100 Laptop Project, Computer Science Teacher [Edit][Delete] July 12, 2006
So what does Microsoft think of the $100 laptop project, especially given that the computers will use Linux operating systems. This blog post isn't an official response, but as it comes from a Microsoft staffer we can get an insight into how they may feel. And how they feel, in a word, is critical. The Linux system, he writes, "has an amazingly poorly designed user interface that is unnecessarily complex". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Miguel Guhlin[Edit][Delete]: Feature - Download a la Mode Series, Around the Corner [Edit][Delete] July 10, 2006
It's hard to go wrong with resource, a list of basic educational technology how-to articles varying from how to install an FTP server to how ease concerns abput data theft or loss. Both text-based articles and audio recordings are available. More...