By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Andy Carvin: Will WSIS Help Achieve a World of, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth November 3, 2005

Presumably Canada will have representatives at the upcoming WSIS meetings in Tunis, but I have no idea who they are or what they will say (if anyone has a lead on this, please send me a note). Meanwhile, Andy Carvin, who will be attending WSIS from the United States, tackles some of the tougher issues in this longish post, issues like: "If the digital divide dissipates into a global wireless cloud, will democracy and freedom flourish?". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Press Release: alphaTXT, ClearTXT November 3, 2005

ClearTXT is an instant messaging and SMS system that allows schools and instructors to send messages to students. It operates as a Blackboard building block, which means you need to have the LMS to make it work. Nifty idea, and schools have started using it. In what doubles as a useful public service and a savvy marketing move, ClearTXT has launched a service called alphaTXT, which will be offered free to all schools, that allows them to broadcast emergency notifications. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Amber Thomas and Andrew Rothery: Online Repositories for Learning Materials: The User Perspective, Ariadne November 3, 2005

OK, it's official. I am now siding against use cases, scenarios, and the other typical design methodologies, as instantiated in this post about learning resource repositories. Why? Because they freeze your perspective on design and development into a view of what is rather than what could be or ought to be. The use cases here, for example, limit the author's view to learning resources created by tutors or publishers, to uses consisting of 'put' and 'get', and to thinks like intellectual property rights being at the forefront of design principles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Joseph Hardin and Amitava Mitra: Sakai and the Higher Education Community: The Road Ahead, Educause November 3, 2005

A very heavy presentation with many images and screenshots, and one that reads more like marketing than research and development, but the author makes a good case, demonstrating not only that Sakai has been widely adopted but also, and even better, that Sakai is, first of all, morphing into a community-based development effort, and second, that Sakai is looking toward service interfaces that allow local developement in PHP or Perl. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tim Porter: The Rise of the Norgs, First Draft by Tim Porter November 2, 2005

Interesting post that looks at what newspapers need to consider as their medium dies (the average age of newspaper readers is now 55 and circulation continues to decline). Specifically, they need to turn to their core value, which is 'news', not 'paper' - and cast themselves as 'norgs' (News Organizations). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Hoare: Breaking with Convention, The Guardian November 1, 2005

Interesting proposition: "UK universities are becoming confident in delivering degrees by distance learning thanks to lessons learned from the collapsed UkeU, the ill-fated government-sponsored project conceived at the height of the dotcom boom to exploit an expanding overseas market for e-learning". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeffrey M. Perkel: The Future of Citation Analysis, The Scientist October 28, 2005

An article like this, which compares between the usefulness of Google Scholar and Thomson Scientific's Web of Science, can only be considered a snapshot, partially because Google Scholar remains in development, and partially because there is an ongoing, though gradual, migration of scientific work from the closed to the open web. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Dave Pollard: Three Necessary Capabilities for Becoming Aware, How to Save the World October 27, 2005

Dave Pollard writes relentlessly about new ways of seeing the world, and his work, with its basis in people like Francisco Varela, is approaching more and more every day the view fostered by people like George Siemens and myself. This new way of learning (and it is indeed a new way) is the topic of my talk this evening, so it's on my mind (and hence, I'm more attuned by commentary like Pollard's today). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems October 26, 2005

If you have been following the discussion with David Merrill on ITForum, a discussion which has touched on the distinction between simple and complex systems, you will find this site to be worth a read. "Complex systems can be identified by what they do - display organization without a central organizing principle (emergence) and also by how they may or may not be analyzed - decomposing the system and analyzing subparts does not necessarily give a clue as to the behavior of the whole". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gardner Campbell: There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education, EDUCAUSE Review October 20, 2005

It's a good article, though I found the scenarios used to introduce the topic at the beginning of the article to be over the top; better would have been some real-world examples. Otherwise, the author offers a relatively light and education-focused account of podcasting. Also noteworthy is the podcast version of the article. More...