By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Leslie[Edit][Delete]: Short Video on Common Cartridge, EdTechPost [Edit][Delete] August 22, 2006
I don't know - it just seems to me odd that interoperability has finally been achieved - at the course level. "IMS Common Cartridge, recently demonstrated in action between Angel, Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT at the Alt-i-lab 2006 sessions... to create a common standard for full course import and export between CMS and useful to publishers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sonia Arrison[Edit][Delete]: A Laptop in Every Hut?, TechNewsWorld [Edit][Delete] August 16, 2006
This opinion column argues that the $100 laptop initiative is a group of "open source zealots are looking to export their ideological crusade overseas, creating a need for their commercial services by tying a new generation of young consumers to laptops running on Linux software." The author is from the Pacific Research Institute, listed at SourceWatch. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Press Release[Edit][Delete]: Oracle and Unicon, Inc. Unveil Plans to Create Next-Generation Academic Enterprise Environment, Yahoo! [Edit][Delete] August 15, 2006
This came out at the beginning of August but I've just seen it now. In a nutshell: Oracle is backing Sakai, the open source LMS. Now, if we think about that for a second, we have here a pretty clear and unambiguous response from Oracle to the Blackboard patent, which was unveiled just four days before this announcement. And that response - which is actually unprintable in this newsletter - is, I think, more eloquent than anything else I could say here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Cormier[Edit][Delete]: The Edubloggypodlearnonlinosphere - Are We a Field And If So..., August 15, 2006
Dave Cormier asked this question in reaction (in part) to a statement on Wikipedia to the effect that I am unremarkable - it's nothing personal, says Cormier, but if I'm not remarkable what does that say about the field as a whole? While I sat and pouted at the Wikipedia dis (doesn't being connected to Adam Curry count for anything?) Cormier set up an Ed Tech Talk segment in which I spent about 45 of a planned 5 minutes talking about propaganda and publicity pre- and post-2.0 style. And while I joke about the Wikipedia thing, I do think the remarks on the Ed Tech Talk show are well worth a listen. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alex Ragone[Edit][Delete]: 21st Century Learning #20: Bill Fitzgerald on DrupalEd, Ed Tech Talk [Edit][Delete] November 1, 2006
With Drupal 5.0 just released (in very Beta) this discussion of the education-specific verion of Drupal, DrupalEd, is timely. "A distribution for Education will mean different things to different people: a set of tools to support classroom blogging, a set of tools to support teacher professional development, a set of tools to allow a school to track student progress (aka a SIS), a public-facing school web site, an internal teacher professional development site, a personal learning space (the PLE), to say nothing of the library sites, the LMS's, etc, etc, etc." Also worth a look is the Drupal Groups feature generally. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dean Shareski[Edit][Delete]: EdTech Posse Podcast 2.3 - Communities, Open Source in Education, Ed Tech Posse [Edit][Delete] November 1, 2006
Some audio discussion of my recent critique of K12Online and the responses. Folks, this should have been a very minor thing; it was just a casual remark on one small post. But as this link points out, many of the comments in response "seemed more like they would be heard in a junior high class." From my perspective, this vindictive response just reinforces what I have been saying recently about groups and networks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rune Kvist Olsen[Edit][Delete]: Vertical To Horizontal: A New Workplace Reality, uncharted.ca [Edit][Delete] October 26, 2006
I'm not endorsing this item, but I am not exactly disputing it either. Certainly there are many parallels with my own thinking, and it is interesting enough to pass along. Some things to consider: "There are no such things as nice bosses. Control is by its essence damaging and destroying to self-awareness, self-esteem and self-respect whether or not the boss is nice or bad"t. More...