Paulo Freire
Kim Díaz, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/02/05
The entry for Paulo Freire in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just been updated. It's worth taking a few moneths to read if you are not familiar with the man or his work. More...

Research on Learning and Performance
Following an email conversation this week (yet another bug report - I need to spend some serious time with my web site this weekend) I took a wander through Jay Cross's Internet Time Group website. Of particular interest for readers of this list wll be his elearning weblog. More...

E-learning and the Professional Development of Trainers and Vocational Teachers
This new survey of trainers in Europe replicates results I have seen elsewhere. The vast majority of them undertake some form of learning and the amount of learning is increasing. Noteworthy is the fact that most of their learning is informal learning. More...

ASTD Certification Institute Launches E-Learning Courseware Certification Program
Article announcing the launch of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) online course certification program. The program has actually been on the ASTD website for several months, so this announcement is a little out of date. More...

What's a Web Service? Experts Want to Know
Web services are the Next Big Thing and they will be infiltrating your online course development environment any day now (if they haven't started already). But what are they? This article attempts an explanation - it's not too technical (which left me a little frustrated) and spends a lot of time talking about what experts think they are (or might be). More...

Web Services
Three part series from WebReference. Part One introduces the concept and some major underlying principles, such as SOAP and UDDI. Part Two describes how to call a web service. Finally, Part Three describes web service behavior and its four supported methods. More...

Cave Of Dreams: Simulations in Higher Education
It seems like pre-history, but it was only eight or nine years ago that my colleague Jeff McLaughlin and I developed the Painted Porch MAUD, a multi-user learning learning environment based on a MUD (or, as most educators would say, a MOO, though a MOO really is quite different technically). I mention this because one of my pride and joys in the Painted Porch was a simulation of Plato's Cave - Jeff and I were philosophy instructors, after all. More...

SmartForce to Buy Centra in $284 Million Stock Deal
As the headline suggests, Centra, known for its real-time virtual classrooms, is to be acquired in a $284 million stock deal by SmartForce, known mostly for its e-learning content but also for its LMS and content creation tools. More...

Stanford Online Courselets
Welcome to a new bit of jargon. The 'courselet' is defined as "a self-contained, integrated set of learning materials designed as a custom tutorial and offered online in support of Stanford engineering, science and engineering management courses." More...

Intellectual Improprieties
Did you know someone was granted a patent in 1998 for 'training with manuals'? Or that someone else has a 1996 patent for a computerized data representation technique we all know as 'pie charts'? These are two extreme examples cited in this short article describing some of the U.S. Patent Office's larger errors. More...