By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Defining an E-Learning Strategy
Good strategy: "Your first step is not to select an LMS and the technology for creating your courses. Before you even think about technology, get a good grasp of your corporate business goals. Define the vision, business and operational strategy for the learning group. Then, making use of whatever tools you may have, define learning objectives by curriculum and individual learning experience." This article has more. More...
Turning fantasy into a reality that helps others
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Turning fantasy into a reality that helps others
Coverage in a Taipei newspaper of Luc Chu's Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS), which is translating MIT's OpenCourseware into Chinese. More...
Adult Literacy Meets Technology (AL-T)
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adult Literacy Meets Technology (AL-T)
New blog started for members of the adult literacy - technology mailing list, hosted by the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research Consortium (ALNARC). More...
Technology Source Archives Are Under Construction
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Technology Source Archives Are Under Construction
For those of you who missed the Technology Source archives, fear not, they're coming back. In this email to ITForum editor James Morrison explains where they went and wehere they're going. More...
An Old Design for an eLearning Aggregator
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Old Design for an eLearning Aggregator
Study this item carefully - this is very much what e-learning of the future will look like. Scott Wilson bases his approach on the design of social networking sites such as 43 Things, then inserts an interface with learning resources. I like his design - clean, simple, colourful. This is just a concept, but - note well - all of this could be designed with existing technologies. More...
Google Print Search
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Print Search
You can now search Google Books, and the masters behind the search engine have done it right. Pointing to this resource, Aaron Swartz offers a sample search. Clicking on the search brought me (surprisingly) a useful result, this Perl text from O'Reilly, Perl Template Toolkit. More...
Social Computing Symposium: BlogTrace Demo
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Computing Symposium: BlogTrace Demo
Interesting work on the mapping of weblog communities. The idea here is that a 'knowledge flow' is the communication of some knowledge, typically a natural language post on a weblog as viewed by a reader. More...
Grounding the Innovation of Future Technologies
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Grounding the Innovation of Future Technologies
I'm not sure this is true: "innovation, development, and evaluation of design ideas cannot be based only on the designer's intuitions but must be grounded in users' actual needs and behaviors. We need to apply social and psychological sciences to understand how technology could qualify a positive change for the users." The reason why I express doubt is that the 'need' for an innovation often becomes knowable only after the innovation has been introduced. More...
Trackback is Dead. Are Comments Dead Too?
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Trackback is Dead. Are Comments Dead Too?
Without saying "I told you so" let me ponder for a moment where we go from here. Trackback and comments are suffering for the same reason: they provide a means to allow spammers to put their content on your site (the same is true of spam email, expect their content goes into your inbox). So how do we address this? First of all, it seems to me, is that we need to change the location of the comment. More...
A Collected Group of Educators
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Collected Group of Educators
Mark Berthelemy notes that Will Richardson makes his subscription list available on Bloglines. You can also view my subscriptions as well. This list is my filtering list for EduRSS 0.2 - in other words, the sites listed here are the sites that will be harvested by the next generation EduRSS. More...