By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Once a Booming Market, Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive
Who didn't see this coming (aside from the publishers of proprietary educational content, I mean)? "What happened was an explosion of new, often free technologies competing to entertain and teach children. Young children have long been a primary audience for computer learning games". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sharing Learning Contexts Within A Distributed Conversation Model
Scott Wilson takes us on a fascinating romp through a variety of technologies to see whether they offer "a way of constructing and sharing context." None of them really does the job, he writes, though FOAF groups stands the best chance. Tom Hoffman interprets this as a technology problem, arguing in essence that RDF would do the job nicely. I see it more as a definitional problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Government Textbook Gets High-Tech Boost
Just an example of what a government can do once it gets past the idea that texbooks are something that you have to buy. "At UT (University of Texas), readings for mandatory political science course will be online — and free to students, public." The savings - mostly to students - on this one book amount to $300,000. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The End of the Paper Syllabus
Just an example of what you can do once professors get past the idea that handouts have to be on paper. "The dean... told professors that — for financial and educational reasons — they should put their syllabuses online, and stop distributing them on the first day of classes." Savings. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice
This editorial introduces a special thematic section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and is worthy of a read in its own right (the remainder of the articles are available here - no RSS (*sigh*)). In about nine paragraphs the authors provide a nice history of the concept of online community, drawing into the discussion strands of thought from sociology, psychology and anthropology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-learning a key theme at AUSTAFE 2005
Summary of this recent conference held in Sydney. But the best bit is this link to session summaries and podcasts - congrats to Sean FitzGerald and Stephan Ridgway for putting this together. Wheeee... it's a conference in a box. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From Multimedia to Multisensory Education
It was nice to hear from Douglas Levin, who informs me that the people at Cable in the Classroom's Threshold magazine "have plans underway to address many of your criticisms." He also highlighted this article, which I did not mention in my post yesterday. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard
Blackboard doesn't have a blog or an RSS feed or any of that other newfangled technology, at least, not that I know of, so I missed this announcement when it came out last week. Eventually it did circulate through University Business, and so, I pass to you the information that Blackboard has a new website. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Curriculum Leadership
The August 19 issue of Curriculum Leadership is online (here is another prime candidate for an RSS feed). One entry that caught my eye was 'Critical, analytical and reflective literacy assessment: reconstructing practice' by Heather Fehring, however, the link to the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (AJLL) where the article should be takes me to a page that hasn't been updated since 2002. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs & RSS as a School Communication Environment
Dave Warlick has caught aggregator fever. In this post (and yes, it's a continuation of the 'blogs as conversation' conversation) he offers several ways aggregators could be used in a school environment: lesson plans, lesson reflections, lesson blogs, dynamic categorization, announcements and policy, subscription analysis. "The aggregator is the linchpin of this arrangement. Teachers must be able to refine their settings and how their subscriptions are organized." Yes. More...