Happy New Year
I am home from Ottawa. This year I will spend New Year's Eve in a comedy club.
2006 was a year of extremes for me. It was a difficult year, but only because it was one where I tried to live my life to the fullest, and I guess I can't regret that. I made memories to last a lifetime, I touched so many places and so many lives, and was more than rewarded in kind.
I dreamed last night that I was given a fine suit, a thousand dollar suit that I would never buy for myself, with a silk scarf and a long overcoat, that when I wore it I looked like and felt like I had found my success in this life. I trimmed my hair, just a bit, to match the suit, and when I walked down the road, I strode forward with a flourish, waving the tail of my coat behind me.
Kia ora. Thank you, to all of you, and best wishes for the coming year. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web December 29, 2006 [Link] [Comment]. More...

Why 2008 Will Be a Bad Year for Microsoft'S Ed Tech Market Share
The low cost (and ease of use) of open source software, combined with low funding for education ("about 9% of spending on defense and the war on terror") means that commercial software giants like Microsoft will see a continually declining share of the educational technology market. More...

Seeing Flowers Reproduce On Genome Island in Second Life
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Wikipedia Death Watch?
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A Lifesaving Checklist
Things that seem really obvious aren't always so. And though it comes from the field of medicine, this debate over the use of checklists is illustrative. The story, in brief, is that a hospital decided to try using checklists to ensure proper procedures are followed, and were following up by evaluating the results to see whether it worked. More detail here. More...

The Best Links 2007
Jason Kottke has a good, if voluminous and sometimes fluffy, blog, and his top links of 2007 is among the best of the best - I've spent the last hour on the page and decided I'd better link to it or I'll never finish today's newsletter. More...

FeedForward Project: M1 Release Imminent
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Last Year's eLearn Magazine Predictions
Everybody's looking forward to the future. I look to the past - last year's predictions of the future. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour January 2, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]. More...

A New Year'S Copyright Puzzler
David Wiley hasn't responded to my response to his questions yet, but he has posted a couple more items in his own ongoing look at the Creative Commons Non-Commercial clause (CC-NC). On Wednesday, he created a game on CC-NC. More...

Where's That Line Between True Democracy And Mob Rule?
A furor has erupted on Digg his week. On Monday, a reader posted visual evidence of a power user submitting an exact copy of an earlier post - and getting 3000 diggs while the original user received almost none. The resulting comment thread has more than a thousand reactions. More...