By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canadian Council on Learning
The Canadian Council on Learning, "a national, independent, not-for-profit corporation that is committed to improving learning across the country and across all walks of life," has launched its website. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Connecting the Dots
Entry-level discussion of recommender systems with some sample sites (such as Musicplasma.com, Music-map.com - neither of which really worked on my computer). The author sense the appeal of the systems, though, and correctly observes that adjectives (ie., metadata) are not needed in order to enable the system to work. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canadian MP Says Extended Licensing Proposal Delayed
Michael Geist reports that "the government has delayed plans to introduce a much-criticized copyright proposal to establish a extended license for educational institutions." Good news. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hybrid CSS Dropdowns
Half the article deals with how to make nice standards compliant menus for your web page. The other half discusses how to make them work properly in Internet Explorer. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai
This is pretty neat - a presentation describing the use of RSS to display library course reserves through CTools, the Sakai-based course management system (Sakai is an open source learning management system). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Literacies: Some Observations About Writing and Wikis
Short item observing, correctly, that "writing is being treated more and more as a visual entity. No longer is the unbroken, uniform, left to right flow of text the norm. Instead, in the new media especially, text plays a secondary role to images, meandering around them..." The author then considers the question of how people comprehend such writing, especially when, as in a wiki, it is written by multiple authors. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die
Newspapers are still as profitable as ever. That, though, is part of the problem facing the industry; as the tsunami bears down on it, close enough to feel the foam, it is hard to escape the feeling that all is normal. Jay Rosen notes, "the fact that it's still (highly) profitable is one of the signs of this death." Same for the music industry. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen's Web Themes
So anyhow, after working on the OurMedia site I was feeling pretty comfortable with CSS, so I decided to redo the website. But I am also very lazy and have tired of rotating my theme every few months. So I set up a system that lets me easily create new themes, and which handles theme selection and rotation automatically. Click on the link to visit my website; you'll be greeted with a random theme. Click on the [Theme] link to rotate themes, or on [View Themes] to select from the list (the link is under the picture on the right). Not the neat thing about this is that you can use my random themes too - check out the sample here (notice it's a completely different site). Here's a template you can use on your website. This is all experimental, so please let me know if you have problems with it. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 22, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. JotSpot
JotSpot is an online wiki application (currently in beta) that can be used by anyone to set up their own wiki. There are some very nice features: a nice WYSIWYG page editor, the capacity to email content to a page, and a set of applications that can be plugged in to pages. Great stuff. As an example of JotSpot in action, see Lawrence Lessig's communal rewriting of Code and Other Laws on a JotSpot wiki. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DfES publishes new e-Strategy
Link and analysis of a new strategy paper in Britain, DfES's Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services. More...