By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Ashburner, et.al.: Open Letter from Fellows of the Royal Society December 7, 2005

Members of the Royal Society write to express their "disappointment with the Society's recent position statement on open access to published research." The Royal Society recently released a statement essentially opposing open access. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kristine Peters: Learning on the Move, Mobile Technologies in Business and Education, Australian Flexible Learning Framework December 7, 2005

Pointing out that mobile technology is already embedded in our lives, this report argues that mobile learning is not merely traditional teaching on small devices. "The interactivity of mobile technologies creates new teaching and learning opportunities more suited to a constructivist approach where the device is a tool for information and direction, but the structure of the learning is created by the learner". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Konrad Glogowski: Tools Interiorized, Blog of Proximal Development December 7, 2005

This is pretty interesting - what happens when students used to blogging suddenly lose their environment. It turns out, they miss it. "My students didn't really miss writing itself. Had that been the case, they wouldn't have complained about writing in notebooks. What they missed was situated writing, a cognitive activity situated within a specific space that fosters cognitive engagement". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teemu Leinonen: The $100 Laptop: Manna-vaporware, FLOSSE Posse December 7, 2005

In an airport conversation in Calgary recently I commented - cynically - that MIT had gotten a lot of publicity over a product that does not exist. The topic was the $100 computer, which had been introduced at WSIS. Such scepticism, it seems, is not limited to my suspicious mind. Teemu Leinonen poses two questions that defy easy answers: "Why the only use case the MIT people talk about is delivering school books with the $100 Laptop?". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Josie Fraser: Edublog Awards December 6, 2005

Nominations for the Edublog Awards have been announced and voting is now open through December 17. Last year I was nominated in four categories and took home one award. This year I appear in four nominations and would be lucky to win one, such is the quality of the entrants. Visit this site not so much to vote but also to get a very good representation of the state of the art in our field. It's amazing what we've all done this year together, and to think, this is only the beginning. Kudos to organizer Josie Fraser for pulling this together. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Declan Butler: Science in the Web Age: Joint Efforts, Nature December 6, 2005

Writing in Nature, Declan Butler wonders why more scientists don't blog. "many researchers still see publications in the formal scientific literature as 'the' means of scientific communication... for most scientists and academics, blogs and wikis remain unattractive distractions from their real work. Many consider them an online version of coffee-room chatter, background noise that goes against the very ethos of heavily filtered scholarly information". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mitchell Weisburgh: What do Kids do on Computers?, PILOTed December 6, 2005

Interview with Robert Kvavik, co-author of the ECAR of Students and Information Technology. Some interesting bits. For example, "We hear all this hype about digital natives and millennial students, and then find that they only had a moderate preference for technology in the classroom". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dustin Diaz: Top 10 Custom JavaScript Functions of All Time, Web Standards With Imagination December 6, 2005

I've used a bunch of these, and have needed them all. Each function is described, though not as fully as they could be. Event and cookie functions predominate, as would be expected. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John McAdams: Marquette Dental Student Suspended Over Blog Posts, Marquette Warrior December 6, 2005

OK, I'll confess. Sometimes I got out for a beer. Sometimes I go out for a lot of beers, though less frequently these days. And sometimes, when I was at school, I disliked my professors. Admitting to this, were I a student at Marquette, could get me suspended and worse. That is, after all, what happened to a student who made similar statements in his blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeff Lebow, Jeff Flynn, et.al.: EdTech Mega-Brainstorm #14b, Ed Tech Talk December 5, 2005

I am sitting here listening to EdTech Mega-Brainstorm #14b which, after a brief discussion of PowerPoint ("PowerPoint is not a gateway drug, it just leads to more PowerPoint"), launched into a lengthy discussion of whether blogging ought to be required in class. The show's hosts, surprisingly (and in my view, wrongly), aregued that it should. More...