Copyright, Access and Digital Texts
Good overview of the case for open access to educational materials, with a lot of links later on in the paper to open content projects. More...

A Method of Evaluating Training
Nice short white paper describing what the author calls the DMAIC methodology for training return on investment (ROI). DMAIC stands for Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. More...

Blackboard Inc., Partners with Leading Academic Publishers
Blackboard continues to make news as it announces a deal to integrate various learning applications into the LMS. According to the press release, "The development project, titled 'ChalkBox,' will go beyond simple importation of textbook-related electronic content to accommodate more sophisticated integration between the publishers' hosted instructional applications and Blackboard-powered course web sites at client institutions." Partners in the project include Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Education and Thomson Higher Education. More...

Learning to do Social Science Research in the Knowledge Economy: A Manifesto
Gosh, I love papers with the word 'manifesto' in the title. And while the topic of this tract diverges a bit from the usual e-learning fare, it is a nice counterpoint to Jay Cross's comments on edubabble and also some of the discussions I have had here about research methodology in public policy. More...

Calendar extension for NewsGator
Not sure how this will play out, since we're mixing Outlook, a NewsGator extension, and RSS 2.0 (none of which bodes well for portability), but the discussion in the RSS community has turned to events listings. This is something that has been needed for a while, and forms another bit of glue in the semantic social network. More...

Jilted Entitlement
A lengthy discussion has erupted on the Invisible Adjunct over the job prospects of non-tenure track academics. The comment begins with the observation that large numbers of fully qualified people are able to obtain only temporary employment. More...

MIT’s Double-Secret Hidden Agenda
I'm not sure that the agenda - getting other universities to put their course materials online - was such a secret, but it offers a bit of a hook into this account of the OpenCourseWare project. More...

IDEO: Stanford Center for Interactive Learning
Most of the places I've worked - including my current location - have been really badly designed for any sort of academic work. Even new buildings seem to focus on long, narrow hallways into which people disappear into their offices. Not that I dislike offices - I do, and I wish I had one, because people need their privacy. More...

Edubabble From Ontario
Nice commentary from Jay Cross which is, if anything, too kind to the Organization for Quality Education, an organization that is, as he says, "a group of Ontario citizens up in arms over the poor quality of their public schools." Cross quite rightly criticizes this group for reliance on buzzwords, the use of straw man arguments, and unthinking aherence to a dogma. More...

Online Communities 'are old-skool' says Amy Jo
George Siemens picked up this item citing Amy Jo Kim, known for a book about online communities, suggesting that the wave of the future is centered around social networks, buddy lists and blogs. Of course, this is a change only if you felt previously that online communities were top-down creations, which while characteristic of some accounts (such as hers) is not universally believed. More...