By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is the Nightmare Finished?
Overview of the stock market performance of the major e-learning companies, including Saba, SumTotal (the merged Docent and Click2Learn), Blackboard, Centra and Skillsoft. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gospels of Failure
Fascinating article on organizational failure. And if you mapped this article to my recent talk on blogging communities, you would find a near-perfect fit. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How do we Learn the Things we Value Most?
I too have been reading some of Dave Pollard's recent work with interest (and it's long overdue for acompilation post) and I find myself not only nodding in agreement with Brian Alger's assessment but also wanting to say that this is the motivation that informs my own approach and style: "these models, ways of thinking, methods and processes are so completely devoid of any reference to authentic living that we delude ourselves in an ever increasing spiral of abstraction... we forget to talk about ourselves... where are the lives of real people in all of this intellectual scaffolding we hold on to?" The presumption always seems to be, if we somehow create a system, it will all be better. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Would an Infinitely Rational Pirate Play Soccer?
Subtitled "A Geek's Guide to Gaming the College Admissions Process" this article is a lighthearted look at the use of sports by geeks to ease their way into college admissions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Guru of the Obvious
Preparing to rule us all with an iron fist in a velvet glove, the king of the long tail, Leon Ipglips is coming to get us. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time
Doug Peterson, doug - off the record, March 11, 2013
Dough Peterson asks, "Just how do computers store time anyway?  Does it think in days, hours, and minutes?" I actually have something like an answer to that question. Computers think in seconds (or, if they're stuffy, milliseconds). For a computer, any given time is a certain number of seconds after an arbitrary start date, known as the epoch. For unix computers (and therefore Linux and, these days, Apple) the epoch started at 12 a.m. January 1, 1970 (GMT). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Someone took my feedbag
Brian Lamb, Abject, March 14, 2013
Brian Lamb on Google's announcement. On the one hand, he takes an attitude of acceptance. "I have a hard time working up much outrage. I see something almost pathetic in begging Google to take pity on us and keep the service open." And "I place this as the latest episode in an increasingly sad story, a sequel to when Twitter discontinued RSS support." But maybe it will result in something good. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are Third-Party Cookies Worth Saving?
Brian Morrissey, Digiday, March 15, 2013
While we normally think of browser add-ons that disable tracking cookies, the case is not so clearcut. With Firefox now blocking the cookies in the browser itself, a debate has erupted in the content and advertising industry. More...