More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs
In this editorial for the New Brunswick e-learning newsletter, After 5, I describe how the common conception of weblogs as the uninteresting personal rants of the disaffected has evolved into a powerful information sharing and community building tool. More...

Edu_RSS Upgrade
My RSS aggregation service, Edu_RSS, has two new features. First, an RSS feed of the aggregated listings is now available for harvesting by other services. More...

New Jersey Institute of Technology Prohibits File Sharing on Its Campus
Probably a sign of a trend, the move by this campus reflects the concern that administrators feel over the recent billion dollar lawsuits filed against students by the music industry. But look, this is a temporary solution at best, because what makes music downloads stand out today is the size of the file. More...

David vs. Goliath
More discussion of the potential - and in my view, likely - move of the enterprise software giants like SAP and PeopleSoft into the e-learning market. This article predicts that the powerhouse vendors will garb 25 percent of the LMS market by the end of 2004, most of it from their existing customer base. More...

The Curriculum of the Body in the Age of Electronic Mediation
I think that Norm Friesen is right to say that we need to look beyond the simple accounts of interaction offered by the early theorists of computation. But I do not agree that we should go so far as to say, with Friesen, that "computers cannot enter the world of obligation and concern that ultimately gives language its meaning." Pulling out the phenomenalism of Merleau-Ponty doesn't establish the case. More...

Open Source Courseware -- Evaluation and Rating
This is a great resource - a listing of major open source courseware platforms, rated and evaluated (with a clear and rational set of evaluation criteria). The article also begins with a pragmatic and honest assessment of open source solutions in general, frankly admitting that they're not for everybody and clearly stating that they require a certain degree of expertise and committment to operate. More...

Students Settle in Lawsuit Over File Swapping
The students, of course, never really had a choice, the industry knew it, and the settlements - no more than $17,500 - prove it, each being less than that probable cost of mounting a defense against the RIAA's ridiculous lawsuit. More...

New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive?
Search through the Internet Archive and you get exactly none of my work. Mine is what is described as New-Model Scholarship, "the variety of Web sites and other desktop digital objects that faculty and graduate students are creating that fall somewhere short of 'published' but are worthy of access into the future." Yet it seems destined to disappear from view when my academic career ends. More...

Overcoming the Presentation Mosaic Effect of Multi-Use Sharable Content Objects
Albert Ip expresses dissatisfaction with the solution to the SCORM cross-domain problem presented in the Engelbrecht article and outlines an approach which has been used in Australia that has successfully overcome this problem. More...

SCORM Deployment Issues in an Enterprise Distributed Learning Architecture
This article is dauntingly technical, but it's a great read, clearly illustrating why SCORM cannot be deployed in a multi-domain environment. In a nutshell, the SCORM API interfaces (commonly known as the 'wrapper') require that the learning object and the LMS communicate with each other using Javascript or a similar technology. More...