By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Music File Sharing to be Offered Legally
In an experiment worth watching, an ISP is bundling the cost of music file sharing with the cost of internet access. While there are good reasons to be wary of access providers also acting as content providers, this approach nonetheless seems infinitely better than the current mechanism that involves broken CDs and suing your customers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Right Ways and Wrong Ways of Podcasting in Education
Short article with supporting podcast (or is it short podcast with supporting article?) on the right way and the wrong way to do podcasting in education. The keeper: (Don't) "require students to listen to the podcast while staying tied to a computer." Ack, I can't even imagine the horror. And Reynolds emphasizes: "I'm not a believer in 60-minute speeches...". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If You Don't Build It, They'll Build Their Own...
Brian Lamb - who manages wiki support at UBC - runs across a bunch of UBC students pondering their own wiki in a conversation at LiveJournal. He offers the official services, but is told, "using a UBC-hosted wiki requires us to comply with a certain set of standards and forces us to give UBC the final say in content... a wiki should be democratic, and any university-owned pages and servers aren't". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs, Forums and the Nature of Discussion
(Just click on 'Login as a Guest' to read.) The people at Moodle are going through the same sort of reasoning I have regarding blogs, comments and forum posts. Martin Dougiamas writes, "We need to think very deeply about forums, blogs and the other types of posts Moodle allows to come up with a unified idea that is so simple that anyone can understand it straight away (these are the hardest ideas to think of)... the best we could come up with was to remove the comments from blogs and extend the blog trackback system to keep track of links between blogs and between blogs and forums etc". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Contexts, Boundaries, Asymmetry
Scott Wilson clarifies his recent remarks. "In the special case of a teacher-initiated conversation (the topic of my post), there is a need to create an initial agreement based on the topic and the participants; unlike the kind of conversation we're having, a course usually starts with the students having no knowledge of who else is taking it". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Response to article 'EdNA Groups or the Open Network':
EdNA Services Assistant Manager Mark Tranthim-Fryer has posted a response to an article covered recently here in OLDaily regarding the question of whether EdNA groups should be open. He writes, consultation with all sectors of the Australian education and training community has strongly endorsed the provision of both open and closed online community spaces" and that "group owners make the decision about the appropriateness of whether their Group is public or private. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?
OK, this post is mostly speculation, but it's informed speculation, and even though it's a little out there, it is beyond neither comprehension nor reason. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the applications we normally store on our computer - things like MS Words, email, PowerPoint, and the like - will in the future be hosted on the web. This will mean that we're not bound to Microsoft, that our applictaions will work the same (and be the same) no matter what computer we're using. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Wants to Own Content?
This article starts from the premise that the content-hoarders have lost and that "the army of all of us, the ones who weren’t in charge, the ones without the arms — won." What does that mean? "The value is no longer in owning content or distribution. The value is in relationships". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Access to Education
Just to put things in perspective: first, "Education is arguably the key to ending extreme poverty but more than 100 million children worldwide are not in school." And second, "$5.6 billion per year (is) required to achieve universal primary education by 2015". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understanding Meaning
George Siemens links to this column (actually a series - see the navigation links at the bottom of the page) by Michael Bayler. This particular item is a nice outline of the concept of meaning. I don't agree with all of it (for example, I'm not sure I want to ascribe the moral dimension to meaning that he does). More...