E-Learning in Easy Pieces
So I spent the week-end recovering from jet lag and listening to hours and hours of audio. The archiving is going well, though I am reaching disk space limits on both my laptop and my website. Who knew disk space labled in gigabytes would be too small? Anyhow, for those who can't wait for the full archive, here's a teaser, my talk from Darwin. Click here for the audio - 1.5 hours, 11.2 megabytes (clicking on the title gets you the slides). Now I'm off to NAWeb, another talk, then home to rest for a couple of weeks. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, October 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Organisational Issues in eLearning
Found via an Auricle article summarizing my talk in Perth, this set of slides by Rob Koper both reinforces and offers an interesting take on the idea of learning networks. Drawing from work in small words theory, Koper proposes modelling learning networks as a graph where the learning is a set of 'activity nodes' within some knowledge domain (what I would call an environment). More...

Agent Support for Online Learning
In a sense, this is the 'other' way to approach the discovery and organization of online materials: through the use of agents. This paper describes the use of agents in an educational environment, "It is our claim that well-chosen software technologies, involving agents, can raise the self-organising powers of the network sufficiently to make a LN [Learning Networks] a viable option." Why do I call this the 'other' approach? It's not clear to me at this point that something as complex as an agent is required; I think that the network may be more robust than anticipated. More...

E-Learning Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? - The Director's Cut
I missed this item when I was toodling around over the Pacific, but you shouldn't. This is a first-rate paper looking at plans for JISC, the state of e-learning technology, and the impending roll-out of web services. More...

E-Learning in Easy Pieces
Slides from my talk in Darwin. Again, I have made a recording, but the combination of 60 megabyte files and dial-up access prevents me for passing it along just now. I also have slides from my Queensland talks - not so informative, but they will give you an idea of what I talked about. I also created a resource page for some talks, no real content but lots of links. Remember, I have also placed resources on my wiki. I've also added photos from Kakadu. This is my last newsletter from Darwin; I'm in Alice Springs tomorrow but will take a day off the newsletter; the next one will come from Uluru, I hope. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, September 25, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...