TeachersPlanet
As Pete MacKay summarizes, "Teachersplanet.com is a community for teachers who are interested in growing their careers. The site is well organized and contains subject-specific professional guides and comprehensive resources for the classroom." You'll also find some job listings on the site, some shopping, personal tools and special interest areas. More...

Fighting Piracy With P2P Blocking
As this article notes, "the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song or 'Friends' episode." Of course, it may have also picked up academic papers, contracts, personal files and images, and more. More...

Cal Poly Campus's Faculty Faces Battle Over Proposed Anti-Pornography Resolution
On the one hand, nobody wants university resources to be wasted in the viewing of pornography, especially when this material may be left on desktops, printed on network computers, or just generally within the view of people who would be offended. More...

Microsoft Expands Rights Management Tool
Microsoft announced today that it will be releasing a test version of its rights management server (RMS) next week. They get the concept partially right: the protection is document specific. But in order to view the document, a user would have to be able to access the Windows Server running RMS on first opening a document to authenticate the rights and decrypt the document. Otherwise, the document cannot be opened. More...

The European E-learning Market
From the (PDF) summary of a larger document: "The survey aims to discover what the latest developments are in eLearning (i.e. the use of new technologies in training and learning) in organisations in Europe that both supply and use e-learning for the purposes of vocational training and continuing professional development." Classroom training continues to lead the way with online learning hanging in there at around ten percent and blended learning averaging about fifteen percent. More...

Terms of Engagement: Keeping Learners Online
This article discusses five key elements involved in keeping learners interested and engaged in your online learning: entertainment, interaction, control, usability, and customization. More...

Answer Geek

"I've been asked to create a virtual university. Can you give me some ideas?" Um, if you have to refer to this short column for the answer, then the best advice I can give (and this column should give) is: don't. I mean, really. More...

Colleges Ambivalent About Anti-piracy Role
According to this article, "The nation's colleges have quietly succumbed to pressure from the entertainment industry to crack down on student use of file-sharing networks to trade music and movies." But while this may true, staff at these institutions are "ambivalent" about their new role and are not caving completely to the industry's demand. "We try to do it the right way. We're trying to say you cannot violate copyright -- not that you can't use Kazaa. You can't steal other people's intellectual property," said Jack McCredie, UC-Berkeley's assistant vice chancellor of information technology. More...

CORES Registry
Unless you are in the business of developing and using metadata this site won't be of a lot of interest. However, if you are in this business, the CORES registry of metadata schemas may become a valuable tool. More...

Boardroom Despatches: E-learning - Will Its Day Ever Come?
This oddly disjointed article asks whether e-learning's day will ever come. It concludes that it will, but in between is a somewhat suspect comparison between British and American model of learning, one that involves flying a student from Scotland to the U.S. every couple of months. More...