When Plagiarism's Shadow Falls on Admired Scholars
Rip. Mix. Burn. Two Harvard professors are caught with unattributed remix content in their books. Piracy? Plagiarism? Of course not - it was all an oversight. The punishment? "'The discovery is the punishment,' Professor Gillers said." Sure. Let's punish students in the same way, then, or underground remix artists. More...

Every Ontology is a Treaty
The latest issue of SIGSEMIS: Semantic Web and Information Systems is out - and once again, I am forced to ask why a semantic web organization can't publish their journal in XML, or at least HTML, instead of the decidedly non-semantic PDF. Anyhow, the highlight is this issue is the interview with Tom Gruber, well known for his work on ontologies. More...

Ads Making Overtures in RSS
Some discussion of recent moves by companies like Overture, the search advertising division of Yahoo, which is working with Feedburner, to insert ads into RSS feeds. There are only a few places ads could be inserted into feeds; these services insert them at the source as they offer to create RSS feeds for you. More. More. The only other place, really, is in the RSS reader - and with 640 different readers available, that's not really a reliable placement. More...

Global Learn Day: GLD8 Educational Technologists Talk Online
My contribution to Global Learn Day is available as an MP3 audio feed (2.9 M) - I talk about the Firefox launch, the emergence of blogging in the Yukon, and the spirit that lies behind all this - the idea that we could provide learning to everyone in the world (please note the sound is bad for three minutes during the introduction, then my talk comes out very clearly). Another recording of my talk (by Robin Good) is available here. Robin Good also contributed a useful presentation to the event, Ten Technologies That Are Going To Change The Way We Learn - search technologies, data visualization tools, blogs, audio and video, RSS, P2P, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth (Wifi, WiMax), real time collaboration tools, and collective and collaborative filtering. By Stephen Downes and Robin Good, Stephen's Web, Robin Good, November 22, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Blogs, RSS and Other Cool Stuff
People seem to like that title. They also like the presentation, which covers everything from content management systems, blogs, wikis and RSS. The MP3 audio of my session Friday in Whitehorse, Yukon, is available online. The main link above points to my Yukon photos, which you can use to decorate your desktops, slides or web pages. On Saturday I went hiking at Miles canyon in the Yukon wilderness with fellow photographer and former RCMP officer Hank Moorlag, who offers his photographs of the day (including one of me on a cliff). Don't miss his other set of Yukon photos. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, November 22, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Why Work
I think this is a good question: "In order for capitalism to succeed, everyone had to believe that earning more money, even if he had no particular need for it, was a good thing. But why would anyone believe that?" The search for the answer to this question occupied the bulk of sociologist Max Weber's career. More...

E-Learning in the Middle East - A Fast Growing Market
This brief item points to a trend observed here - the growing e-learning market in the Middle East. It would have been nice had the article noted some key trends, such as the move of companies like Microsoft to entrench themselves in the region. But this teaser article contents itself with pointing to the high spending and the market penetration of companies like WebCT. More...

Google Puts New Slant on Scholarship
More coverage of scholar.google.com, this time from the Guardian. After a brief introduction and some observations on the debate about open access to scholarship, the author then tests the service with five vague topics. Of course, looking for 'the Battle of Hastings' or 'Life on Mars' isn't a typical use of an academic citation index, and so it's no surprise to see the results returned as general as the query. More...

Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004
From the report: more than 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003. Schools expect the number of online students to grow to more than 2.6 million by the fall of 2004. "Schools that offer online courses believe that their online students are at least as satisfied as those taking their face-to-face offerings." Detailed report, numerous statistics. More...

50 District Schools Will get a High-tech Leap into the Future
This is one of those stories where you really wish the commercial press would tell the whole story - or at least link to things. On the surface, it's a good news story: the Philadelphia school board plans to invest some $75 million in new technology in 50 of its 275 schools, with plans to support all of them at a cost of $1.5 million per school (you will only be able to click to this item once - it's one of those fake links that makes you register if you ever go back). More...