By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ajax3d Demo
Um, hmm. 3D using Javascript. It works, but is totally not useful in Firefox on Linux (Firefox on Linux has always has rendering issues, and for some reason it doesn't interrupt the right mouse click properly). Still.... very interesting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canadian Schools
Some nice writing describing the work of Darren Kuropatwa and Clarence Fisher - "two Manitoba-based teachers who started as active bloggers with the goal of connecting with educators worldwide. Now they've taken what they know to the classroom, leveraging a raft of tools such as GoogleDocs, Thinkfree, Writely, iRows.com, YouTube, iTunes and other web-based multimedia-type freebies to create new learning environments". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. About E-Journals: Archiving and Preservation
Briefing article on journal article archiving and preservation writtn from a predominately British point of view. As the article notes, "a systematic approach to the issue of ensuring continued access to licensed e-journals has remained elusive." The report looks at the role of institutional and open access repositories and considers current e-journal archiving options. This seems right: "there needs to be a range of options for ensuring long-term preservation and access of the world's scholarly e-journals". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Casual Fridays: We Can Identify Mystery Faces Just 6 Pixels Wide!
This is actually one of a series of posts on this blog about facial recognition. I'm linking to it because this sort of work is the basis for my assertion that human reasoning consists, not of rules and language, but of pattern recognition. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School 2.0 Revisited: What's In A Name?
Response to some statements questioning the use of the term 'School 2.0' as an "effort at retrenchment" or an effort to "protect one's own turf". Sessums says he is "more drawn to reforming schools in the guise illustrated by Stephen Heppel's NotSchool or the Sudbury Schools," arguing that "the challenge before is to find a process that allows both order and innovation in individuals and society" because "schooling will most likely continue to be culturally and politically significant in our society." They are intended, he writes, to bring students closer to society. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Authoring Our Eduselves
Doug Noon raises the interesting thought that a student's portfolio is a way to evaluate his or her teachers. Not an entirely fair way (because, after all, what teacher can control his or her charges?) but useful enough to give a rough indication. "Not that I'd mind," he writes, "but here I am just making it up as I go! There's no standards for e-portfolios yet, are there?" More thoughts on student web postings from the Illuminated Dragon. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Is a Dublin Core Application Profile, Really?
This is a pretty good post, though the writing is pretty dense - if you are not deeply into metadata and application profiles then you might not be interested in this post. Basically, Dublin Core (as with any metadata specification) leaves open the question of which sort of descriptions ought to apply to which sort of entities in different contexts. An application profiles provides this determination. In this post, the development of application profiles as 'templates' or 'patterns' is discussed, what might be called 'description profiles'.
That said, work is progressing on a Education application profile via a wiki on the Dublin Core site. And Sarah Currier, in a post to the JISC mailing list, reports on the recent DC-Ed working session in Mexico. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stanford President's $$$, Conflicts of Interest
I think this item is worth noting, given how often we are shown Stanford as a model of practice in the new public-private partnership entrepreneurial world. "The Wall Street Journal reports what the local media should have done long ago: Stanford President John Hennessy's myriad financial deals with Silicon Valley companies, including some fairly obvious conflicts of interest (which officials say aren't serious or have been dealt with). More...