By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John McAdams: Marquette Dental Student Suspended Over Blog Posts, Marquette Warrior December 6, 2005

OK, I'll confess. Sometimes I got out for a beer. Sometimes I go out for a lot of beers, though less frequently these days. And sometimes, when I was at school, I disliked my professors. Admitting to this, were I a student at Marquette, could get me suspended and worse. That is, after all, what happened to a student who made similar statements in his blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Terry Webster: Schools in Quandary over Bloggers, Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram December 5, 2005

The debates over student blogging continue to rage. This news article highlights the sensational: "A Birdville High School cheerleader was kicked off the freshman squad last month for having vulgar language in a Web log, or blog, she maintains on her home computer." But does the school's authority extend that far. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. James Farmer: Edublogs Being Blocked, Incorporated Subversion November 23, 2005

As james Farmer says, "you know you’re doing something right if people start trying to stop you" (I know the feeling). Still, it is a bit hard to understand why Farmer's outstanding edublogs service is being blocked by some school districts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Photo of Me November 21, 2005

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Terrance Heath: Blogging on the Clock, Morph October 27, 2005

This is pretty funny. "U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the quivalent of 2.3 million jobs". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wayne Parry: Catholic School Tells Students to Remove Internet Blogs, Newsday October 27, 2005

From this article, "Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta appear to be heeding a directive from the principal, the Rev. Kieran McHugh, to remove personal postings about the school or themselves from Web sites like myspace.com or xanga.com, even if they were posted from the students' home computers." The argument cited is that the directive is intended to protect students from online predators. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens: The Joys of Shallow Thinking..., Connectivism Blog October 27, 2005

This is an item that fits pretty well with the talk I'm giving this evening, a look at how to maintain professional development in an age of chaos. In this item, george Siemes defends 'shallow thinking', that is, a generation of onloy a surface level awareness of some things as a means of recognizing and ordering an information flow. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Josie Fraser: Edublog City, Ed Tech UK October 25, 2005

The 20 millionth blog indexed by Technorati turns out to be a school blog from an elementary school in Reims, France. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gina Trapani: Google Reader Spotlight: Publish Posts to your Blog, LifeHacker October 10, 2005

Google launched an RSS feed reader last week to wide - and generally negative - publicity in the blogging community. Not because people questioned whether the world needed another feed reader, much less one by Google (though there was that undercurrent), but more because people found the interface less user-friendly than most of Google's previous work. Some writers reported having trouble uploading their OPML (a format that lists their subscriptions) from Bloglines; mine mostly uploaded, but it wasn't problem-free. More...