By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Reality of Open-Access Journal Articles
Open access is a reality now, write the authors, and so the academic articles asking what it would look like are now moot. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DrupalED - Corrections
"Definitely not by 'Boris Mann and Will Pate'. Charlie Lowe (http://www.cyberdash.com) was the genesis of all this, and everyone is invited to participate. The site is an organising website to catalyze activity and interest from the education sector in one place. The outcome will be a Drupal "distribution" -- a selection of modules and configuration optimized for use in education. Anyone that is interested in participating...come on over and create an account." Thanks for the correction Boris, and apologies to Charlie Lowe. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seven Myths about Voice over IP
Reasonable article with a typical IEEE conservatism addressing the prospects for Voice over IP (VOIP) technologies - that is, internet telephones. The author takes an enterprise point of view, noting that VOIP entails bandwidth and equipment costs, but also points out that it is likely to replace traditional telephony. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hybrid CSS Dropdowns
Half the article deals with how to make nice standards compliant menus for your web page. The other half discusses how to make them work properly in Internet Explorer. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Greasemonkey as a Lightweight Intermediary
We're still in the early stages of this, but rapidly approaching a time when websites will be manipulated at will by the browser. This item is a description of Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that lets you create a JavaScript function that is executed whenever your browser loads a given page; the script loads and displays extra data in from another server. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai
This is pretty neat - a presentation describing the use of RSS to display library course reserves through CTools, the Sakai-based course management system (Sakai is an open source learning management system). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EVDB
EVDB is a calendaring service that supports RSS feeds of custom calendars. The beta launched today. As the website says, EVDB "helps people find relevant events and share their discoveries with others. We're building a worldwide repository of event and venue data that the whole world can use. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Literacies: Some Observations About Writing and Wikis
Short item observing, correctly, that "writing is being treated more and more as a visual entity. No longer is the unbroken, uniform, left to right flow of text the norm. Instead, in the new media especially, text plays a secondary role to images, meandering around them..." The author then considers the question of how people comprehend such writing, especially when, as in a wiki, it is written by multiple authors. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die
Newspapers are still as profitable as ever. That, though, is part of the problem facing the industry; as the tsunami bears down on it, close enough to feel the foam, it is hard to escape the feeling that all is normal. Jay Rosen notes, "the fact that it's still (highly) profitable is one of the signs of this death." Same for the music industry. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Centered Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organisation
James Farmer weighs in with a nice post describing how aggregation networks foster communication in social networks such as intranets. The key, argues Farmer - and he is exactly right here, right in an important and subtle way - is that the networks formed through aggregation foster community in a different, and more effective, way that networks formed through structures such as category trees. More...