Embracing New Brunswick E-Learning
Still no permanent URLs at After Five, so this link will expire in August. But this editorial describes a newcomer's impressions of the state of e-learning in New Brunswick and provides a nice list of links. More...

AOL blogs!
The buzz late last week and over the weekend was around AOL's planned foray into blogging, a foray unveiled by means of a private showing to some influential blogger (the amount of publicity generated shows that the marketing plan obviously worked). More...

The Knowledge Economy: Learning and Work Integrated
The premise of this paper (MS Word document), which looks at workplace learning, is that "the role of education in preparing individuals with differing interests and ambitions to become responsible citizens in a democratic context, and in creating an adaptable workforce, will continue to grow." But how do we understand this trend. More...

Checking in with Mr Safe
The debate about Echo continues with this commentary from Dave Winer, which puts the issue into a nutshell. Winer beliefs two things. First, as he writes here, he believes that standards development must be the work of a single person, maybe two or three, not by committee. More...

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Peter Suber, who until last September published the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) news regularly, is now able to devote much more time to the same enterprise after obtaining support from SPARC. Additionally, he maintains the Open Access News blog, which has just changed its name from FOS News. More...

Blogger API Update
Change continues to sweep the blogging and RSS development community as Blogger (recently purchased by Google) announces that it is abandoning its old XML-RPC based application program interface (API) and is developing a new protocol based on SOAP. More...

The Relation between Ontologies and Schema-languages: Translating OIL-specifications in XML-Schema
"Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems," writes the author. A schema, meanwhile, "provides [the] basic vocabulary and predefined structuring mechanisms for providing information in XML." Consequently, "Ontologies applied to on-line information source may be seen as explicit conceptualizations that describe the semantics of the data." In other words, a schema defines what properties an object can have, while an ontology specifies the possibile values of those properties. More...

Copying Troubles a Hiccup for Linux Festival
This is ridiculous. According to this item (via elearnspace), CD copiers declined to create copies of Linux distributions because of copyright agreements. The excuse offered was that the SCO case created an issue. Then it was argued that the owner of the CDs could not prove they had the rights. More...

Welcome to CourseWork!
Vendors of commercial LMS and course management systems must be wondering what new product line they can pursue. This announcement is yet another in the list of free, open source course management systems. More...