By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes: mIDm, Stephen's Web November 29, 2005

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stuart Yeates: Royal Society Has Come Out Against Open Access Journals?, EDUCAUSE Blogs November 28, 2005

As you can imagine, people are disappointed by this stance, though the author of this item expresses doubt that it completely represents the Royal Society. Stuart Yeates writes, "The issue is challenging for the Royal Society, because like many scholarly societies they currently derive a large portion of their income from selling journals to institutional libraries". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Christoph Schiller: The Adventure of Physics, Motion Mountain November 28, 2005

It's not the most user-friendly download ever (by definition, being a PDF) but it's hard not to be impressed by this. Motion Mountain is offering this complete physics textbook as a free download. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lisa Galarneau: Could I Have Your Attention Please?, Relevancy November 28, 2005

Lisa Galarneau is right to point to this presentation by Tantek Çelik (the same person behind microformats.org) about Attention.xml. This is a clear example of what I have been calling 'second party metadata' - the idea here is that the use of a resource is as important, if not more important, as the nature of the resource. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A.J. Hirst: Social Bookmarking Interoperability, OUseful Info November 28, 2005

Good discussion of how the metadata produced by various social bookmarking services (such as del.icio.us and Connotea) can interoperate. The major difference between the two service is (naturally) how they link to the resource - del.icio.us linking directly, Connotea linking to an intermediate page (the latter has become the staple in the blogosphere as well). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Cormier: What is this Whole School Thing About Anyway?, Dave’s Educational Blog November 28, 2005

Two strands of thought come together in my mind, and this strand - the question of whether we need education-specific environments (such as the PLE) is one of them. The other is the ongoing discussion circulating around the education blogosphere about schools blocking weblogs and other websites (see here, for example). Both revolve around the same idea: in learning, we want access to the internet, but not necessarily all of it - there's a lot out there that would aid learning, but a lot that, frankly, gets in the way. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rob Wall: EdTech Posse Podcast #009 - Breakfast chat at SACE with Stephen Downes (part 1), The EdTech Posse November 28, 2005

The first part (of three or four) of my breakfast conversation with two members of the Ed Tech Posse at SACE in Regina last week is now online. In it we talked about open content, music, and political change, all themes following from my talk at the conference the preceding day. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes: Options, Stephen's Web November 28, 2005
In addition to some design changes (most noticable to GMail readers, and still in progress) you should notice a new 'Options' link at the top of your newsletter today. Over the weekend I filled a large hole in my website software by rewriting the login script to manage subscriptions and user options. You may be interested to note that the script now supports FOAF (both as input and output), albeit in a minimal way. It is now also a fully-functioning mIDm application - more about that tomorrow. In the mean time, the major change for you is this: you now have to log in to unsubscribe. I hesitated to do this, but the way it was before, someone could set up an automated script and unsubscribe everyone. If you want to unsubscribe, click on the options link - if you have lost your user ID and password, you can have it emailed to you. Anyhow, if you have any problems at all with login and options, please let me know - it should be working properly, but you know me and software... [Tags: Newsletters, Subscription Services] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine: Everything Steve Johnson Writes About is Bad For You, Cogdogblog September 8, 2005

Alan Levine reviews Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and gives it four paws up. He writes, "Johnson's view on pop culture is so fresh, new, and insightful, it is invigorating. So maybe if you don't buy that 'pop culture is actually making us smarter' this book should give some deeper thought before just dismissing pop culture as a wasteland". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Hoffman: Smart Internet 2010, ESchool News September 8, 2005

Summary of a recent report released in Australia, Smart Internet 2010. The comment from Boing Boing is (typically) condescending: "It covers a lot of ground (much of it likely familiar to you if you're a regular BB reader), aimed at a general audience (e.g., net-clueless regulators)". More...