Elusive Vision:Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy
Via CogDogBlog comes this link from Macromedia to a White Paper summarizing discussion about learning objects from 18 luminaries in the field. After the usual introduction to learning objects, the discussion turns to the learning object economy, which is depicted by Masie as being "about content, content, content." The paper predicts five separate marketplaces, the first sign of awareness I've seen that there is this segmentation occuring. More...

Goodbye Bar Codes: Packages With transmitters on the Way
The press is abuzz with news about RFIDs - Readio Frequency Indetifiers - that will start appearing in products in stores this fall. The article predicts that RFIDs will replace bar codes with two decades; I predict it will be a lot sooner. More...

A Copyright Cold War? The Polarized Rhetoric of the Peer-to-Peer Debates
This is a nice article that looks at the rhetoric behind the debate over file sharing and compares it - successfully - to cold war rhetoric. That said, I'm not completely satisfied with the result. More...

Information Politics: The Story Of an Emerging Metadata Standard
Good discussion of the politics and in-fighting that goes on behind the scenes in the adoption of a metadata standard, in this case, XBRL, a business reporting standard. What bothers me is that the author presents this as a good way to do it: "those who would promote a new metadata standard might certainly learn a strategy or two from these skillful operatives. More...

Patent Bending
This brief article gets at what's wrong with the current patent environment in a few sentences. Imagine a world in which you had to pay royalties if you sold advertising in newspapers, fast food, delivered packages overnight, or threw a forkball. Patents hinder the competition from copying your invention, which by most accounts is fine. But today's regime crushes entire industries. More...

Shibboleth v1.0 Software Available
The Internet2 consortium has announced the availability of Shibboleth 1.0, the first production version of the software. The purpose of Shibboleth is to allow a user registered at one site to obtain authenticated access to resources at another site. More...

Court Backs Thumbnail Image Linking
Way cool! "Search engines' display of miniature [thumbnail] images is fair use under copyright law, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, but the legality of presenting full-size renditions of visual works is yet to be determined." I can't see the latter being so easily accepted. More...

Making Decisions About Open Source Software (OSS) for K-12
This set of resources offers a nice step by step tour through the arguments for and against the use of open source software in schools. It is a balanced presentation - sometimes annoyingly so - and is presented in such a way as to allow administrators decide what is important. More...

Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and Necessary
The bit about new ideas we know and understand - they are disruptive, but we like them, and we like their champions, because that's how we grow. Ah, but where to find new ideas? Not on the web, according to Laurence Prusak, the author interviewed in this article. More...

The LOM RDF binding
Presentations and draft meeting minutes for the IEEE learning Technology Subcommittee meetings held in Chicago a couple of weeks ago are now online. More...