By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: South Africa - Australia - New Zealand, September 1, 2006
I am writing from Toronto International Airport, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt. It's the first leg of what will be a month-long global tour that sees me in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
I will begin at the WWW Applications Coneference in Bloemfontein, South Africa, offering a workshop on Web 2.0 and e-learning all day September 5 and opening the conference with a morning keynote of learning objects September 6. After a short break in Kruger National Park I will be heading to Cape Town, where on Tuesday the 12th I will offer a Lunchtime seminar (E-Learning 2.0: Tools for Meaningful Learning) and an afternoon seminar with Joseph Hardin: Learning Technologies: The Next Five Years, both at the University of Cape Town (contact Tony Carr for info).
Then it's to Australia, where I will speak on September 15 twice, once on e-learning 2.0 and then (I discovered today) on digital rights management. This is the Association of Independent Schools Conference in Sydney; contact Melanie Hughes for info.
Then it's across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand, where I will meet up with a group of fellow travellers from around the work and travel around the country doing seminars, giving talks, and more, widing up at e-fest in Wellington September 27-29, where I will give another keynote. Then it's back home for a breather before talks in Fredericton, Toronto and Barcelona in October.
Huge thanks to everyone involved in setting this up, and especially my colleague Sophie Leblanc, who has negotiated my path around the world with her usual expertise. I am excited about this trip - and I'm travelling with the complete road kit, including video cameras, two computers, editing software, the works. I am planning to bring you with me, through video, webcasting and more. I won't know what I can do until I'm on location, but I've got the gear and I'm ready to roll.
Meanwhile, if you are waiting for email, or articles, or web pages, or reviews (about eight items in the queue) - I'll be on airplanes for two days, so it'll be a bit, but I have your number and I'll be crafting content en route.
So... they're calling my flight. See you on the other side... [Tags: Online Learning, Learning Objects, Networks, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Web 2.0] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John Lorinc[Edit][Delete]: The Bottom Line on Open Access, University Affairs [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

Longish article on open access with a specific focus on Canadian issues, which I enjoyed. Good coverage, including reporting on lobbying against open access in the U.S., coverage of SSHRC deliberations on the issue, and accounts of some specific cases, such as IRRODL's attempt to get funding while functioning as an open access journal. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boris Mann[Edit][Delete]: Identity 2.0: We Must Federate and Cooperate, B.Mann Consulting [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

A general observation I have. People who have sites or destinations - things they want people to come to - want to federate. People who are more interested in what other people have to offer, and not focused on their own site or service, want something much more open, not just a federation but a democracy, where anyone can proclaim their identity. We hear a lot from the service providers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Feldstein[Edit][Delete]: In Defense of Walled Gardens, E-Literate [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

After an Orwellian opening, Michael Feldstein gets down to it in defense of walls. First, "Sometimes privacy is appropriate... If you want your students to take risks, you have to create an environment that is safe for them to do so." Fair enough, but I would observe, there is a big difference between the case where you build your own walls and lock your own doors, and where the government does it for you, whether you want it or not. And second, "faculty should have the ability to use copyrighted material legally with their classes at their discretion." Maybe, but this special case should not be allowed to define the general case (it would be equally absurd to say that because some people want to lock their front doors we ought to install locks and gates on freeway entrances). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. David Wiley[Edit][Delete]: On Distributed Tools and Mashups, Iterating Toward Openness [Edit][Delete]Iterating toward openness [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

David Wiley writes: "if we fully distribute data and go searching around for it whenever we need it, it doesn't take that many users before the query traffic eats up all available bandwidth." We should not have to go aound searching. Nor should we need a centralized repository. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Attwell[Edit][Delete]: JISC publishes Guidelines on Open Source, The Wales-Wide Web [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska, where the sun is shining and the air is crisp. Today finds me pensive, reflective and hopeful, thinking about the Spirit Sands in Manitoba, about birch trees and the beaches of Fremantle, about community and culture, about reaching out and living within. And about how, maybe, things are getting better. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dave Tosh[Edit][Delete]: PLE's - Are They What the ePortfolio Promised to Be?, Dave Tosh : Weblog [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

I think this is a good question. "Did vendors and institutions kill the initial promise of e-portfolios by trying to turn the concept into a single tool (product) used to measure student achievement?" More: "As Helen Barrett said: 'I am very concerned that the current crop of commercial tools are 'perversions' (Lee Shulman's term) of the portfolio concept.'" Jeremy Hiebert offers a diagram that is closer to the concept originally envisioned. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Martin Belam[Edit][Delete]: Building An Effective Web Presence In A Large Organisation, Currybetdotnet [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

A year or two or so ago the people who run BBC's e-learning web offerings asked me for my thoughts on how the site should be organized, to which I responded with a long discussion about personalization and what I called at the time 'vectors' - essentially an approach to allow multiple perspectives to be offered on the same body of information. I don't know how much influence my comments had, if any, and I don't see them reflected particularly here, which is OK, because I think what the BBC has done is interesting and worthy of note. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Miguel Guhlin[Edit][Delete]: TCEA 2006: Podcast Roundup, Mousing Around [Edit][Delete] February 11, 2006

Tired of listening to the local radio station? Here's a full day of podcasts from the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference. Here is full coverage of the conference. Just a sample: "Out of step with a society racing towards technological nirvana, K-12 education struggles to keep up, clamoring for everything from more funding to an Office of Educational Technology Director. Some dismiss the conversations about educational reform on the Web as just so much sound and fury". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson[Edit][Delete]: CoComment: Automating Distributed Conversations?, February 11, 2006

You may be interested to know that I have implemented conversations in Edu_RSS. It's not perfect, and so far utterly nobody has noticed (and there are far fewer conversations than you might suspect, which means I need a better way of detecting the good ones). Here's an example. More...