By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. WebCT Price Increases
No links yet (so this simply links to the WebCT CE home page) but I have reports coming in from more than one institution that WebCT is asking for significant price increases (in the 60 percent range) for its Campus Edition learning management system for upgrades to CE version 6. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sakai 2.0.0 Release Available
Sakai, an open source learning management system, has reached another landmark point with the release of Sakai 2.0.0. "This release includes a Gradebook in addition to an updated version of the Tests and Quizzes tool (Samigo). The existing Sakai tools have been internationalized, allowing translation of Sakai 2.0 into multiple languages". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. NESTA Futurelab Research
Rod Savoie sends this item along, a link to a series of literature reviews in topics related to education and learning technology - topics such as student centered learning, games and learning, e-assessment, mobile technologies, and more. The articles are really hard to read - the HTML displays two narrow columns of text in the middle of the page, while the PDF (which launches in a popup) tries to stuff two large pages in a single frame. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How To Save Public Education
Kind of a nifty idea - ideas on how to save publication, sorted by plans that take five minutes, five days, five weeks, five months and five years. Nifty, but I wish the ideas were a bit better, that the thinking was a bit deeper. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rescuing Social Networking
This link is here mostly for the graphic at the top, a nice conceptual vision of conferencing. But also for this sharp analysis of where social networks have been failing: "existing SNAs offer the user little to do, take too much time, don't provide a customized audience, are socially awkward, and don't provide much that other features of the Internet don't do as well or better." And for the advice near the end suggesting that "what would really make SVP cool would be if we could meter it... [and] automatically bill them and pay us for our time at an agreed-upon rate." Which left me wondering what my market rate would be billed per minute. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Rise Of The Amateur Professionals, Prosumers, Pro-Ams
Robin Good taps into the 'prosumer' meme with a good, well-sourced overview of the movement that sees an increasing number of people creating their own newspapers, radio, photography and even video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Automated Assistance to Educators with Intelligent Agents
Useful short presentation in PDF describing the (future) role of intelligent agents in providing dynamic and context-sensitive information useful to educators and students. More...