By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clayton Wright: List of Ed Tech Conferences, Rick's Cafe Canadian October 4, 2005

Clayton Wright sent me this same list a little while ago, and planned on doing something neat with it. I still plan to - but it might not be until 2006. Putting this new system is eating time - and generating some interesting errors (you'll be interested to know that Apache has an upper limit on the size of the error log and when that limit is reached Apache does... nothing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine: CogDogBlog, Cogdogblog October 3, 2005

If you click on the link, it won't work, which is the point of this item. Alan Levine writes (in an email): "Our "jade" server that hosts the Feed2JS service (http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/) has apparently been compromised and engaging in inappropriate amounts of network traffic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kuropatwa: Scribes and Chat, A Difference October 3, 2005

I though this was a pretty good example of the new face of online learning. Students in this class are charged with creating an online record of what was taught in the class, and after reading some of their chatter on the discussion board we are linked to one of their projects, a summary of sines and cosigns. The point here is that this is quite a good post and worthy of distribution in its own right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brian Lamb: Open Education Wrap-up, Abject learning October 3, 2005

I have never really though of John Seely Brown as the freddie Mercury of e-learning, but the thought apparently crossed Brian Lamb's mind during the course of his writing a summary of Brown's talk at the Open Learning conference last week-end in Utah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. China Martens: MIT Rolls Out $100 Linux Machine, IDG News Service October 3, 2005

MIT - which really knows how to market - picked up a lot of publicity for the non-launch of its $100 laptop. Released in the announcement were the plans for the new device, along with a hint at the marketing strategy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Technical standards and policy team: Shibboleth: a Strategic Approach to School Web Content Authentication and Authorisation, BECTA October 3, 2005

well I don't agree but I'm not surprised: "Becta's research has shown that Shibboleth is the most suitable solution for securely accessing online content for the education sector and should be adopted as an integral component in the strategic approach to the future development of ICT in education, skills and children's services." The benefits of Shibboleth are pretty easy to recognize: it's an open source single sign-on solution that improves personalization and reduces costs and security issues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Malcolm B. Brown and Phillip D. Long: Trends in Informal Learning Spaces, Educause October 3, 2005

If you've got a few hours for the download (it's a PowerPoint presentation weighing in at 36 megabytes) you might find this look at informal learning environments interesting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christian Crumlish, Gene Smith, et.al.: You’re It!, You’re It! October 3, 2005

New blog on tagging containing links such as Ian Davis on Why Tagging is Expensive and defense of tagging to counter Gene Smith argument. Tagging is the rage these days, especially in Web 2.0 circiles. And as Rashmi Sinha observes, it is cognitive cheaper than selecting categories. Still. I'm not going to go back and tag 8,000 posts every time a new tag is developed (which is about every other day). More...