Microsoft's iPod killer?
Here's a question for you: when was the last time you rented music? That would be never, right? So why do you suppose a company behind a new Microsoft online music initiative says this? "We believe this is it. This is what consumers are going to want. We want to be big participant in changing consumers' attitude towards what music really is." What "this" is is a new tamper-proof digital music player that will allow users to 'rent' music on a subscription basis. More...

Ed Tech Conference List
Clayton Wright sent me this list of Ed Tech conferences. I'd like to make conference listings an additional service of OLDaily, and am considering mechanisms that would make this an easy and useful service. More...

The K12 Virtual Primary School History Curriculum: A Participant’s-eye View
Released this week, this criticism (and another one here) of a home schooling class by K12 Inc., a company headed by former US Education Secretary William J. Bennett, was circulated on DEOS this week as an example of the criticism online learning proponents should expect to face. More...

Moving From Theory to Practice in the Design of Web-Based Learning Using a Learning Object Approach
This paper is mostly useful as an overview of the major concepts of learning objects as they may be applied in a practical setting. However, there are some serious weaknesses. First, it seems to me that the module, at twelve hours, is of excessive length. Second, the author does not include any examples of reuse, instead only describing what modifications would be necessary for reuse. More...

Chalkface RSS
The Chalkface Project (home of the free balloon rides) now has RSS feeds linking to its online content offerings. In addition to the main feed, a link to the RSS feed for each category is available on the category page. More...