Quality and Standards
"A brief outline of my position on quality and standards, submitted because it exists..." What follows is the shortest version ever of my 'Resource Profiles' paper, with some comments on quality recommendation thrown in. The item has received some comments also worth a look (and to which I will probably reply shortly). By Stephen Downes, Learning Circuits Blog, December 19, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

2004 In The Rear View Mirror
Something piqued me last year and I came out with 2004: The Turning Point, a foolhardy foray into short-term prediction. I say a lot of things, and some of them might not be true. And people rely on my projections, perhaps not so much as they rely on astrologers, but enough all the same. So how did I do? Let's look at the article. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, December 19, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Blogging and RSS in Education
Slides and the audio from my talk at Acadia here in Wolfville (7 megabytes). Similar to my talk of yesterday, but I spent less time on the basics and more time talking about wikis, RSS aggregation and Edu_RSS. There are some photos of Wolfville, Nova Scotia. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, December 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Copyright, Fair Use and the Public Interest
This opinion column by Neil Turkewitz, Executive Vice President of Recording Industry Association of America, expresses the view that protetcion of copyright is in the public interest. "We base our entire system of protection on the public's interest in promoting the creation and distribution of creative materials," he writes. More...

Library and Archives Canada
I won't link to the article in a certain Canadian newspaper because of its registration requirements, but via the blogosphere comes a good point: while people are gushing with praise over Google's deal to scan and digitize archival materials from some major universities, some other organizations have been doing this for some time - in particular, "Library and Archives Canada, which combines the former National Library of Canada and National Archives of Canada, has been especially active, scanning millions of pages of documents a year. More...

Copyscape
So today's Google Alert came with a big notice about this service, which scans the web to see who, as it says, has plagiarized your work. So I tried it out and the results were as expected: the service takes no notice of my Creative Commons license, and does not even differentiate between legitimate quotations - such as this hit on Jeremy Hiebert's site, which is flagged as plagiarism. More...

A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking
Alan Levine picks up on the reference to Connotea listed here yesterday (and please note the corrected link to the paper in D-Lib). More...

Speegle
A search engine that reads the results out loud to you. A nice demonstration of the technology, but it's a little hard to click on the links. More...

Blogging in Education
Slides and MP3 audio (10 megabytes or so) from my talk today at Mount Saint Vincent University. The talk itself is a presentation of the use of blogging in learning, blogging technologies and aggregators, and some discussion of RSS. The interesting bit comes after the talk, as audience members remained for almost an hour to continue with questions and comments, including thoughts on the ethics of research and blogging along with my thoughts on emerging trends. Today's newsletter comes from Wolfville, where I will speak at Acadia tomorrow. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, December 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Rocketinfo First Search Engine to Release News Search API
Canadian-based RocketInfo has been providing a news aggregation and syndication for some time now, targeting a base of resources that is larger than Edu_RSS or Google News but smaller than the major RSS aggregators. The result is a targeted collection of news-centric resources that can be used to generate high-quality content feeds. RocketInfo also markets RSS aggregators and clients. More...