I'm Blogging This: A Closer Look at Why People Blog
Via Weblogg-Ed, this article casts a wide and interesting net over the subject of blogging. I really like Will Richardson's summary, which will do until you have the break time to read the much longer article. More...

ePortfolios and Weblogs: One Vision For ePortfolio Development
Speculative paper discussing how the use of webogs and e-portfolios could be combined. Quite strong on the tech side of things, and I appreciated seeing an actual (proposed) e-portfolio XML example. More...

Collection of National Copyright Laws Now Online
Like the website says, "Full texts of national copyright and related rights legislation of UNESCO Member States can now be accessed on the website of UNESCO's Culture Sector. More...

The Human Factor
It would be easy to miss the message in this article, which is not merely that 'simple is better' - but even if it is true that everything good is simple (which isn't really the case) it by no means follows that everything that is simple is good. More...

Knowledge Communities in Japan: A Case Study
Via elearningpost comes this case study of the building of knowledge communities in Japan. The major finding seems to be that the building of nickname based informal communication systems can exist side-by-side with more formal face-to-face communities. More...

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
Good article that takes the time to clearly explain concepts like taxonomies and ontologies before going on to a more extended discussion of topic maps and their relation to metadata. More...

Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion?
A few days ago I ran coverage of a story, first covered in New Scientist, about ChatNannies, conversational robots designed to counter pedophiles in chat rooms. It was fun to speculate for a bit, but now this article (and various others) suggest that the software is an elaborate hoax. More...

Shareable State Persistence
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. has released the IMS Shareable State Persistence v1.0 Public Draft Specification. The idea here is that if you have state information in a content object - for example, the number of the last page a reader was looking at - and you need to store it somewhere, then you need a mechanism for knowing where you've stored it. More...

U.S. Online Gambling Policy Violates Law, W.T.O. Rules
American legislation banning overseas online casinos is illegal, the World Trade Organization has ruled. As this article notes, the ruling "has ignited a political, cultural and legal tinderbox" that will have repercussions well beyond the field of online gambling. More...

A People, Once Liberated...
I hesitate to pass this along, because it expresses more emotion than content. In DEOS, Steve Eskow has been on a month long rail against the detrimental effects of what he calls the commercialization of learning - which, it seems to me, he believes includes any use of technology or non-traditional pedagogy. In response to this post, in which he stresses "the need to protect from destruction and disappearance those aspects of the present order that were valuable" (i.e., traditional classroom based teacher-led learning), I express not only my feelings but also some anger at the expression of a view which dismisses, in my view, the legitimate aspirations of those seeking access to higher education. More...