9 am till 1 pm - Breakfast, Lunch and nutrition breaks are provided.

Instructor - Stephen Downes - Back from his globe-trotting adventures - Stephen returns to us renewed, invigorated and as wonderful as ever. Stephen is a Senior Researcher with the National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology

Overview - From out of nowhere, it seems, weblogs, content syndication and new technologies such as XML, RSS, SOAP and REST have come to symbolize the next generation of e-learning technologies. Even for seasoned designers and programmers, these new technologies seem to offer nothing more than a new alphabet soup.

• What do they do?
• How do they work?

The literature is unclear and many of the tools and applications exhibit only basic functionality.
From the misty regions of the East, however, comes a NAWeb veteran with the answers. A blogger (whatever that means) since 1998, an advocate of RSS long before the format had any fans. Stephen will lead this workshop out of the soup and into the clear air of usefulness and practicality. The author of "How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer" and numerous other papers, both technical and popular, Downes is in a unique position to be able to translate the technical into the transparent, the difficult into the delicious, and the picayune into the practical. This session will introduce and define blogs and blogging, show
you how to create a blog in just a few minutes, give advice on blog content and format, suggest educational and classroom uses of blogs, define and outline blog syndication using RSS, provide practical examples of RSS syndication formats, apply syndicated blog content in course web pages, suggests sources of RSS content, and outline future directions for the medium. All this and coffee too!