Archives

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 74 Quality Ruby On Rails Resources and Tutorials
Rich McIver sends along this resource. I'm familiar with a number of the tutorials listed. Some of them are a but out of date (Ruby and Rails have gone through rapid version changes, an artifact of development). Others I looked at today and look useful. The How to Install for many many different operating systems seems especially useful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blog Growth Stalling: Some Reasons Why I Nearly Quit Blogging
According to Technorati, the growth of the blogosphere has stalled at about 14 million active blogs. People still start blogging, then quit. This post offers some reasons why. I would add a generalized category of 'retribution' to the list. This is what you get if you use your real name. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Education Reform
I am not normally attributed with great economy of words, but that's how I'm feeling just now. In response to this post on education reform, I posted a comment. It was short, and I didn't even post it in my blog (I guess I will now). Tom Haskins analyzed my comment and responded with four separate posts drawing out the themes of my response:
- Sizing up the opposition
- Winning without a battle
- Conflicting educations
- No new change required. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Presentations
I had expected to be on a flight on my way to Bahrain at this very moment, however, my conference was postponed. I am still due to speak in London on May 10th and to be at CADE in Winnipeg the following week, though as the paperwork hasn't arrived I'm on tenterhooks. I have been working overtime all week getting the list of my presentations prepared in order to satisfy a different set of paperwork. I was half way through this project when I had to move my site a few months ago, getting all of my presentations into the database. These pages display links to the slides and audio as well as to a slide how player (from Slideshares) and a (mostly nonfunctioning) audio player. I'll be inserting photos and video into those pages as well. Any suggestions on how to improve this display would be welcome. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web May 3, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Project Based Learning, Video, Audio]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Last Lecture
Brian Lamb highlights the idea of the 'last lecture' as evoked in Gardner Campbell's presentation. "if you were you to give one last lecture or presentation, what would you say? Presumably you wouldn't hold anything back, you would share your deepest passions and convictions... but how to use that precious time?" Me, I'd probably be like. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Digg This: 09 F9 11 02 9d 74 E3 5b D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Definitely one for the annals, what we have here is the secret code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD videos (the Wikipedia article has a very useful table describing the difference between DVD formats). A media giant ordered Digg to remove the code, which Digg did, the company not have millions of dollars to fight lawsuits. Digg users rebelled. Digg displays stories based on votes submitted by users, and so for the rest of the day every story on Digg contained the code as users voted for them en masse. "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments," writes Kevin Rose, "you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." Bavatuesday has screen shots of the Digg RSS feed (my own is similar). BBC post on the topic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Silverlight: Ruby and Python in the Browser
Silverlight is a browser plug-in for Mac and Windows that allows scripts written in a variety of languages, including C#, Visual Basic, Ruby and Python, to run in your browser (the way Javascript does today). Silverlight does run in Firefox (though not on Linux). Worth noting is that Microsoft also released, on Monday, a Firefox plug-in (for Mac and Windows) that allows it to run Windows Media animations. Pundits are saying this is Microsoft's answer to Flash, but I would say it's also its answer to AJAX and Javascript, which were running away on them. Will all this extra turn things around? A lot depends on implementation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Journal of Applied Research On Learning (JARL)
Brand new journal launched by the Canadian Council on Learning, and I am happy to say it is freely available online. The journal covers a wide range of topics, from Potential Risks to Reading Posed by High-Dose Phonics to Assessing the Effectiveness of Informational Video Clips on Iranian Immigrants' Attitudes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Letter to Linden Lab
This post reports on an open letter from Second Life users to the company that runs it, Linden Labs. Second Life is beginning to show some strains. People are concerned about their inventories disappearing. There are frequent search outages. The grid itself isn't stable, meaning that teleports routinely fail. The build tools are not working properly. And there are even questions about transactions and Linden dollar balances. These are, in my view, just the sort of problems to be expected from an overly centralized system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Scary Little Computer
Some changes in the specifications for the One Laptop Per Child computer (aling with a new $175 price tag) are raising questions among some pundits. Especially interesting (and troubling) is the allegation that more expensive components are being sued in order to allow Windows to run on the platform. A Wired story states it outright, "Negroponte: OLPC Hardware Altered for Microsoft." Here's another item from ZDNet. But I read something last night (I can't find the link, I'm sorry) from someone who was in the room when the decision was made, and the assertion was that it is to improve the computer, not to accommodate Microsoft. More...