Canada Music Biz Bites Dentists
Another example of the stupidity of the music industry, as a Canadian dentist is dinged for playing music from his iPod in his office. What gets me is that there is no way the performers - mostly traditional celtic artists - are getting compensated. After all, it's not like the dentist's iPod is being monitored, which means that if SOCAN divies up the profits at all, it is among the big-label bands pumped out continuously from big-label radio stations. More...

Group: Linux Potentially Infringes 283 Patents
It's discomforting to see the two sides gear up for what may become an all-out patent war against open source. Can't say I didn't see it coming, though. More...

How to Be Creative
Nice article that should probably have been titled "How to be good at anything." The author's main point is that "everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb," and that the difference between a worthwhile life and the other lies in the decision to climb it (my 'Everest' is stated at the bottom of my home page). More...

RSS Calendar
Finally, an alternative to pre-XML garbled calendar formats. The RSS 1.0 Events module has been kicking around in pre-dev mode for a while now. But now we have RSS calendar. Oddly, the RSS calendar doesn't use the proper RSS format (mostly because readers can't yet read it). More...

I follow my links from time to time on Technorati and I am surprised to find many quality blogs that have received no attention; as Technorati says, "zero links from zero sources". This special issue is attempt to redress that imbalance, to highlight some worthwhile blogs that are worth reading and linking to.

By Stephen Downes
August 1, 2004. More...

Making Syndicated Resource Feeds Fit for Human Beings
There's a lot more that needs to be said along these lines, but let me say for now that Derek Morrison is on the right track when he talks about styling XML so it can be read in a browser. More...

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of LMS Implementations
The first and most important point to note about this article is that there are pitfalls to installing and deploying learning management systems (LMSs), and pretty serious ones too. If we look at the assessment of LMSs by people who have actually installed them, for example, the satisfaction rankings rate barely a pass (and a failure in some areas). More...

Maine Classroom Classifieds
What gave me the most pleasure about this item was sending it to the Online News mailing list, where members have been vigorously defending their policy of more restrictive access to newspaper websites (by the way, for those of you who went to the Globe and Mail site and found it easily accessible, note that the Globe policy of registration triggers only when you've visited the site several times. See here). More...

Constructivism Versus Objectivism: Implications for Interaction, Course Design, and Evaluation in Distance Education.
Good overview and introduction to the debate between constructivism and objectivism. Drawing from the description in this paper allows me to draw the distance between my own thought and constructivism. More...

Personalisation in Presentation Services
This study, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), concludes that "personalisation is effective and feasible in situations where data is controlled and where there is a clear rationale or business case." However, "It identifies several impediments to using personalisation with uncontrolled data, including immature technology and lack of metadata." The meat of the report is found in Section 6. More...