By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Essential Freeware for the PC User
Usually titles containing the word 'essential' are hyperbole, but thisw title is an accurate reflection of the contents. Many of the applications listed - Firefox, Audacity - wilol be familiar, but most everyone will find something new here. For me, it was Videolan's VLC Player, a multiformat and multiplatform audio and video player. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digital Youth: How today's students use digital content in school vs. at home.
The fall issue of Threshold, Cable in the Classroom's magazine, is out and this article is the most interesting of the bunch (the rest of articles don't go a lot of depth and tend to repeat pretty much the same points). In this article, students comment on how their use of the internet at home differs from that at school. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Portal is the Platform, Part III
Michael Feldstein's observations on learning management software has become a three part series (Part One, Part Two, Part Three). I am not sure I would use the word 'portal' as freely as he does - to me, the word 'portal' connotes a centralized structure and directory-based access to resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ARG vs Wikipedia vs Blogosphere
Bryan Alexander offers a good analysis of the Jamie Kane controversity, an incident in which the BBC, in the course of staging a distributed alternate-reality game (ARG), appeared to use Wikipedia to promote its product, creating controversy and accusations all round. Alexander correctly identifies this as a Web 2.0 controversity, and while noting that the criticisms raised questions of trust and reliability, points to how quickly the user-authored media quickly self-corrected. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Academic Commons
While I was flying home from Snowmass on Friday this site was launching. "Academic Commons offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Option for Student Shoppers: E-Books
More on the DRM-enabled e-books being sold as texts by various universities, including Princeton. You save 33 percent, but "access to electronic textbooks will expire upon the completion of the associated class." In addition, the books allow "students to log notes that are linked to a particular section of the book. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Smart Classrooms
"The Smart Classrooms strategy brings together the future perspective and the momentum established by the 2002-2005 ICTs for Learning strategy to build the classroom of the future: the smart classroom". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. WigiWigi
Bill Brandon summarizes: "WigiWigi is the first public release of a video over IP application that is built on a completely new and unique protocol. Unlike other desktop videoconferencing applications, WigiWigi one does not require any specific DLLs, drivers, codecs, DirectX or dedicated third-party libraries. It doesn't even require an installation". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Podcast Theory Gap
Interesting reflections on how students actually use podcasts, and what educators should do when their use is different from the intended use. Best line in the paper: "Fight audio with audio: Podcasts and Audio as a Way to Combat Intrusive Thoughts." This is the norm for me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Principles of Distributed Representation
PowerPoint slides (938K) and MP3 Audio (13m) of my talk today at SAC. (I talk about the changing conception of knowledge, the idea of knowing (and learning) as a network phenomenon, and how that changes how we should approach metadata and in particular learning object metadata. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 9, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...