We Are the Problem: We Are Selling Snake Oil
Well. "Training does not work. eLearning does not work. Blending Learning does not work. Knowledge Management does not work. Yet we collectively reify our denial and project the root of the problem out to an external institutional framework. We are the source of the problem because we are selling snake oil. It doesn’t work but there is still plenty of money in it." So begins this wonderful rant on the Learning Circuits blog by Sam Adkins, who then backs up his comments. More...

Cornell and Other University Libraries to Cancel Elsevier Titles
More on the cancellation of subscriptions to Elsevier journals as purchasers react to increasing prices and an unresponsive publisher. Consider this comment out of Harvard. More...

Weblog Spam
I have tried to convince bloggers that push-style APIs (such as ping, trackback, and the like) are the wrong way to go, without much success. Some early spam seemed to vindicate me, but then came the anti-spam manifesto and a new blacklist. Round one for the bloggers, right? No. More...

Federal Government Contributes $7.5 Million for Research on Distance Learning
This has been in my email pile for a bit, but it is worth passing along. Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) has approved a $7.5 million grant for a project called LORNET, "a new NSERC research network that will develop tools needed to create effective, interactive web-based training courses and programs." The project is largely the work of Gilbert Paquette at TELUQ-LICEF, in partnership with the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. More...

Fidelity Investments Looks To Acquire TEDS
Another merger in the e-learning space as Fidelity Investments acquires TEDS, an LMS company. Or at least, they've signed a memorandum of agreement to do so (and the celebration is set for Monday). E-Learning Guru's Kevin Kruse says this merger is even bigger than Docent-Click2Learn. More...

Neuromarketing
This item, summarized nicely by Jay Cross, goes hand in hand with the previous one. "We identify with our product choices: 'If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger gestalt of who you self-attribute as,' Kilts said, using psychology-speak. 'You're a Chevy guy.' Emotion trumps reason. Build your internal brand. More...

Framing the Issues
I write a lot about meaning and language. While part of it has to do with dry topics, such as how we can find learning objects through use-based meaning, other parts of it are much meatier, looking at the values and ideas we pass onto children. More...

Glossary of Terms
This item has been available for a little while, but I didn't know it. Part of the eduSource project, this glossary of terms was developed to help organize the description of the eduSource project and to provide a base reference for other documents. More...

Delivering OAI Records as RSS: An IMesh Toolkit Module For Facilitating Resource Sharing
It's actually a pretty obvious move, since OAI and RSS are fundamentally the same sort of technology: collections of metadata records are harvested by aggregators, which in turn make subscriptions of specialized content feeds available to readers. More...

Federated Identity
Good blog post on some of the approaches to identity being considered and implemented for online access. As usual there's the closed, centralized way, instantiated by such initiatievs as Passport, Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth. More...