By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scott Wilson: Architecture of Virtual Spaces & the Future of VLEs, Scott's Workblog October 6, 2005

Scott Wilson takes us from the theory of artificial and natural spaces to an examination of similar structures in the world of online learning (echoes of what Jay Cross is saying here). "In an LMS, the architecture of virtual space is derived from the model of the institution... In a PLE, the architecture of virtual space is a web of connections centred on the learner." Why, then, do we drift toward the LMS? Because of a fear of the internet, and a desire for control. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Julien Pain, et.al.: Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents, September 22, 2005

An outstanding work for activists, the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents not only tells you what tools to use and how to blog well, it also tells you how to blog anonymously, route around censorship and to keep your email private. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jonathan Maybaum: When Blogging Isn't Enough..., September 19, 2005

There is no doubt that blogging is a great way to have students create online content. But there may be cases where, as the title suggests, blogging is not enough. What then? You're probably looking at some sort of online database (this is in a sense what programs like Drupal and Moodle do, though it's a very structured database). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reaching the Blogosphere

September 13, 2005 Once again, my audio failed me, and so I have only PowerPoint slides of today's talk (I have since discovered that Windows was blocking the audio driver for my sound card, in some insane supposition that it was a virus). The talk covered familiar ground for readers of OLDaily - the rise of the blogosphere, RSS, writing blogs that will be read, distributed representation and principles of successful networks - all in less than a half hour. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bill Ives: Academic Bloggers – Blog and Perish?, Portals and KM November 7, 2005

More coverage of (the dangers of) academic blogging. Some people still ask, "What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?" If such a person had followed this forum over the ten years of its existence, they would have no such question. And they understand why running the risk of being wrong, or appearing stupid, in public is well worth the reward. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. D'Arcy Norman: Intro to Weblogs and RSS Presentation, D'Arcy Norman dot Net November 9, 2005

This showed up in my podcatcher this morning with no sound and no context (I use a very basic application to listen to podcasts - well, OK, it's a handwritten bash script that snags the files and dumps them into a directory). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes: Best of OLDaily, Stephen's Web September 2, 2005

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Anna Salleh: Blogs Help Students Think for Themselves, ABC Science Online September 4, 2005

It's a pretty light treatment, but nonetheless a sign of the wave of research that will show that blogging has beneficial effects in learning. The article describes "preliminary findings of PhD research by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney... '[The students] are thinking more critically,' she says. 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...