By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It's Not About Web 2.0 It's About Learning!
More reaction to the whole Gary Stager thing. Jeff Utecht - one of Stager's targets - writes, "nothing has ever been accomplished by looking backwards. We need to focus on teaching teachers these new literacy skills so they can in turn teach students." Tom Hoffman, meanwhile, notices that most of the criticisms are coming from outside the United States. Dave Warlick implies that James farmer (and maybe some others) cross a line in his criticism. Dean Shareski has a nice take: "So when Stager asks, 'Why wouldn't we at least try to make schools better?' The answer - it's not a priority." Stager, meanwhile, replies on my website, "It is physically impossible to respond to every one of your concerns, but I'd be happy to try if I knew what they were." Well, I wrote them all out a couple of days ago and posted the link on his website. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Which World for 3D Webbing?
I talked with someone from Sun about their own (Java based) 3D world servers. Meanwhile, this article also mentions Open Croquet and Multiverse. We are still a long way away from this being a useful technology but there's a lot of work being done in a lot of places. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 and Your own Learning and Development
Presentation by Stephen Downes, British Council, Online to London, UK, [Link]

How the Net Works

So this is what I look like when I am presenting by video conference using large sheets of paper so that participants won't have to stare at a black screen while the slides load. So here are the slides, even though they were never seen by the audience (maybe I'll photograph the paper slides). Kate Tyrwhitt, the artist, was also kind enough to record the audio after my recording system died - it's fuzzy but a whole lot better than nothing. There's video, I'm told, but it's not available yet. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web July 23, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Video, Audio, Podcasting]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything
Wiki pages used by Will Richardson to support his talk from yesterday here in Duluth. Link that got the biggest chuckle from me: this page detailing errors in a physics textbook. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pedagogical Affordances of Syndication, Aggregation, and Mash-Up of Content On the Web
This article is a basic summary of Web 2.0 tools as they are applied in an online learning environment. Good overview from the perspective of two projects, the Dekita and Writingmatrix projects. They are "are similar in that they are two examples of what is possible when we are aware of and can exploit syndication, aggregation, and mashup of content in distributed learning environments over the Internet". More...