By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Learning for Development, Commonwealth of Learning [Edit][Delete] February 15, 2006
The Commonwealth of Learning's draft Strategic Plan for the next three years is available and open for comments. It is interesting to note that while the authors comment, "disappointing track record of pure eLearning (i.e., online learning) in the industrialised world risks creating doubts about the effectiveness of ODL (open and distance learning) generally," they also note that, "must engage resolutely with eLearning because in the longer term it holds great promise for developing countries." Which, I think, is right, on both counts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Alan Levine[Edit][Delete]: The Dissonance of Blogs in Education, Cogdogblog [Edit][Delete]CogDogBlog [Edit][Delete] February 15, 2006
This is exactly right: "This notion that an educational blog is something unique and separate from our whole experience is jarring to me. Our lives are strung together from an array of overlapping experiences that transcend boxes, yet we continue to advocate these boxes for learning experiences." I think educators need to learn how to adapt what they are doing to be a part of their students' lives, not apart from those lives. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EduGlu on Eduforge.org, February 15, 2006
Now we're talking. Better than some basement project any day. D'Arcy Norman writes, "I've gone ahead and requested a new project on Eduforge.org to host the mythical EduGlu application development. I've got no idea what this thing might be - not even what language it will be written in - but I'm sticking a flag into the sand to say I'll help build this sucker." I will contribute my code to this as soon as I figure out my way around it (I've never been one of the Forge people - don't know wny, it just never happened). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tony Vincent[Edit][Delete]: Annoucing Our City Podcast!, Learning in Hand [Edit][Delete] February 15, 2006
Ah, this is the sort of thing I love. "Our City Podcast is an audio program for kids and by kids. Students from around the globe are invited to submit a recording all about the city they live in (with the help of their teachers or parents)." It would be nice to see these evolve from travelogues to recurring reports about live in their city. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Paul Maharg[Edit][Delete]: Simulations, Baudrillard, Serious Games, Zeugma [Edit][Delete] February 16, 2006
Good article that captures quite well what I've tried to achieve with this site and in turn applies (correctly, in my view) the same thinking to games. Citing Bakhtin: "The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ewan McIntosh[Edit][Delete]: Would you trust this man with your blog?, edublogs [Edit][Delete] February 16, 2006
Ewan McIntosh has deleted his Typepad blog by accident. If anyone can help him, please give him a call. I hate to think of anyone having to rebuild their site from Google cache. Update: Ewan gives us the step by step story of how the tragedy unfolded. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Catherine Howell[Edit][Delete]: The Future of Blogging, EDUCAUSE Blogs [Edit][Delete] February 16, 2006
"I HAD TO run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go. What if I ran into bloggers?" Interesting. After a recent meetup, Catherine Howell comments, "What was strange was the speed with which our offline interaction was documented, editorialised, and re-presented online. Suddenly our offline meeting had a doppelganger: its online presence or artefacts." Yes, but it's more than that. Not just that as the meetup fades into memory, the artefacts keep it alive. I have always lived my life more or less in public, for various reasons. That's why the blogging, sometimes unexpectedly, of my life doesn't faze me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brett McLaughlin[Edit][Delete]: Mastering Ajax, IBM Developer Works [Edit][Delete] February 16, 2006
This series is now up to three parts (Part One, Part Two, Part Three) and while it's pretty technical (read: if you don't code, you won't like it) it is a pretty sound technical introduction to the new read-write capabilities of the web. For me, well, this is just the sort of link I like to have handy. Also, on a completely unrelated note: Developing games with Perl and SDL. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lorcan Dempsey[Edit][Delete]: The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After, Ariadne [Edit][Delete]ARIADNE [Edit][Delete] February 16, 2006
Good article, from the recent issue of Ariadne, summarizing the evolution of library services in the digital age. What I appreciate most of all, I think, is the understanding in this article that library services need to become dynamic and integrated into the flow of a person's online experience, "supporting the remix of content and services in user environments, and developing digital curation services." There is an enormous need for intelligent information flows - consider this newsletter, for example, which serves just such a purpose. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Harold Jarche[Edit][Delete]: Rx for NB Learning, February 16, 2006
Harold Jarche and I share similar views on how the New Brunswick e-learning industry should proceed. "This Province has the resources, and connections, to create an environment that is friendly for start-ups, especially those that don't require huge sums of money (e.g. Flickr before it sold to Yahoo). This flies in the face of efforts to attract larger companies that can offer more jobs to local people. I believe that using the 'job' as an economic indicator is a crucial flaw in our economic development policy. Instead, we should be helping to create many small, innovative companies. This will foster a more diverse economic foundation, where one failure will not bring down the entire industry. More...