Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century
The author collected interviews from leading researchers in educational games, including Mark prensky and james Paul gee, to provide this overview look at new learning. After a discussion of the (ir)relevance of traditional classroom, the participants look at the learning benefits of games. Many good quotes. More...

Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
As promised last week, items from this month's EDUCAUSE Review. "Remember when the Internet was about opening up access to information and breaking down the barriers between content creators and content consumers?" asks Brian Lamb. Here's the answer: wikis. "The signature of a wiki is a link at the bottom of the page reading 'Edit text of this page' or something similar." What's important about wikis is that they change the traditional approach to publishing. More...

FirefoxIE
It never bears repeating enough: if you are using Internet Explorer, switch to Firefox. There. Now that I've convinced you, you may be wondering how to get all those doo-dads that made Internet Explorer so nice. More...

Stephen's Web - The Redesign
You should have noticed a bright new look today as my website redesign is launched to the world. My focus was to make better use of the screen (it is semi-liquid, flowing to fill smaller screen sizes and staying fixed in larger windows), a bright new colour scheme (which will change with the seasons), and strong CSS support. The biggest change in content is my new home page, which now features a 'Community' section, consisting of the most recent posts to my discussion list. I also updated the Photos page, with additions from Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, Manitoba and Ontario. The newsletter has also been redesigned; using less ambitions CSS, it should work in your email client, and should still display properly if CSS fails. The new design also sets the stage for some later experiments designed to make the newsletter more visual and more interactive. But let's get the basics right first. Is it working for you? Problems, comments, complaints - click on the [Reflect] link and let me know (then look for your comment, front and center, almost, on my home page. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 30, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

SharePoint Links Updated
Microsoft's Sharepoint is an application that helps users "easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization." It seems like a natural environment for syndication technologies, and RSS has come to Sharepoint, both in the form of feed generators (More) and RSS readers. More...

There's AdSense in My Blog!
The message from Blogger (aka Google): "We are going to start paying bloggers. Soon you will be blogging for dollars." The move comes only a few days after Google removed the advertising bar from Blogger blogs (to the cheers of bloggers everywhere). More...

The Semantic Web Meets The Blogosphere
Let's begin with the end on this one, a very Kantian thought: "each animal in cyberspace is a placeholder for a human being with a certain unique sphere of interests. This way, no node in the network is ever redundant or obsolete: everybody contributes, and there is no dead weight." This is right, and deeply right. Now how does this come to be. More...

Dog Wags Tail, not Vice-Versa
The meme of the week seems to be the recognition that the brain does not see what it doesn't want to see (or doesn't know how to see). Jay Cross leads off with this meme to introduce what amounts to a battle cry for workflow learning. More...

Disruptive Technologies Spark Upheaval in Corporate Learning Technology
Today's newsletter is about perception, networks and blogs. Realities that people will not see and new ways of understanding the semantic web. More...