Who Needs Multimedia?
Article defending the use of multimedia in e-learning. While I am supportive, I don't think this is well argued. I think that audio, to be effective, does require broadband and does require a player - Java won't do the job. I think that multimedia, even audio, is time-consuming to produce. More...

SkillSoft as Buyout Bait
Good earning but soft bookings for SkillSoft leads this writer at Motley Fool to suggest it is ripe for acquisition, naming several potential purchasers, including the University of Phoenix. More...

An Exploratory Study to Examine the Feasibility of Measuring Problem- Solving Processes
I'm not really into online assessment, but for those who are, the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment will prove useful - and all articles are available for free online, which makes me happy. More...

Online Newspapers Don't Get It
In the wake of a recent announcement that The Age, an Australian newspaper, is joining the increasing number of newspapers requiring registration, I spent some time this week griping on the Online news mailing list about how such practices were breaking the internet by creating links that mislead readers, taking them to registration pages instead of the articles they were promised. More...

The Role Of Learning Technology Practitioners And Researchers In Understanding Networked Learning
This is a neat paper that captures an issue close to my heart, describing the "divide between learning technologists which have a practical, practitioner support focus and those with more of a research orientation." The author asks, "How can we ensure that the research does inform practice and vice verse?" Well, speaking from the practical, practitioner side, I can offer one suggestion: speed up the research process. More...

Networked Learning and Networked Information
This paper contains an important message, that "integration between different environments, including those delivering information and those supporting learning, is the key requirement." The idea is that "information environments need to be closely integrated with the environments in which their users undertake their mainstream tasks and activities." These observations were reached during the course of the Evaluation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (EDNER) project described in this paper. More...

Networked Learning Conference 2004
Proceedings from the Networked Learning Conference 2004, held at Lancaster University, England, UK, April 5-7, 2004. An outstanding resource, via the E-Learning centre, this website contains the full text of dozens and dozens of papers from this large conference. More...

Ed Radio
So anyhow, today was another busy day, with only a short time available to produce the newsletter. But instead of producing the newsletter, I did this. James Farmer, you see, had this neat idea to record Ed Tech papers. It was well received, and so he started today, recording Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design by David Squires using Audacity, a free sound recorder. More...

A Model for Sustainable Student Retention
The drop-out rate for online learning, note the authors, is steadily about ten or twenty percent higher than for traditional learning. It may be tempting to seek a simple explanation for this, but as they note, there is no simple explanation for drop-out rates in general. More...

Miquel’s Pentagram Theorem
Your word for today is 'concyclic' - points that lie on the same circle. I didn't know that word yesterday, but now I do, thanks to this nice contribution to the internet from Peru. More...