By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching with Tech: Does It Work?
Another one of those articles saying that, since using technology to the exclusion of all else results in bad habits, technology use should be sharply limited or eliminated altogether. The focus is on Tom Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology, another anti-tech book, the latest in a string of similar works. This one created a stir on the WWWEDU discussion list. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. XML-Based Office Document Standards
There has been a huge blow-up in the standards world recently (you should see the pile of documents I got through my Standards Council of Canada account) on the subject of open (XML) document standards. Microsoft used to basically own this field, as its proprietary (binary) Office format was the de facto standard. But industry pressure is forcing even Microsoft to open up. But the standards wars continue as Microsoft squares off against its rivals on exactly which sort of XML to use. The authors of this JISC report on open document standards write "There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats." I don't agree. What the use of an open standard allows is for people to use whatever documetn authoring software suits them the best - the idea is that you don't have to have a "co-ordinated, strategically informed action". This is the big economic advantage of open standards - decisions that used to carry considerable financial risk (VHS or beta, say, or HT or Blu-ray) now carry much less of a risk. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fear
L3RN is a pretty nifty system for uploading and displaying audio and video educational content, based at Seattle Public Schools. This video tells you more. But it seems to be the subject of something else. Mark Ahlness writes, "The departure of the two people responsible for the development of L3RN last week has shocked and rocked me." So, what's the story here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who Owns What: Media V2.0
If you wonder why so many Web 2.0 apps are, um, rather less open than they should be, it could be because of the concentration of ownership in the Web 2.0 space that tends toward walled gardens. This post nicely illustrates this trend with a chart (which, btw, is incomplete - as I don't see Flickr's name under 'Yahoo') of Web 2.0 owners and apps. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blueprint, A CSS Framework
I have always liked grid-style CSS layouts (my own website is an example of that) and this framework takes a lot of the really picky details out of writing the stylesheets (my own site may look very simple, but the CSS took a long time). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Wii Remote API
I'm not ready to work with this yet - I would somehow need to convince NRC to give me a Wii to play with - but the possibilities are intriguing. And think about it - what would it be like to program a web page that four people could use at once. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Trying Out Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for M-Learning
I've long wanted to be able to map routes and mix them with photos - as described in this post. I use the gmap-pedometer to plot my route, but can't add pictures to that. What I want to get one day (maybe I can convince NRC to pay for it) is this GPS-enabled system described by Leonard Low - which would allow me to embed GPS information into the photo itself. And while my camera is automatically creating metadata for me, I want it to record my name and website - and it would be nice to embed a short audio clip (which could be translated to text) by way of description. More...