27 février 2018

Stanford Online Courselets
Welcome to a new bit of jargon. The 'courselet' is defined as "a self-contained, integrated set of learning materials designed as a custom tutorial and offered online in support of Stanford engineering, science and engineering management courses." More...

Intellectual Improprieties
Did you know someone was granted a patent in 1998 for 'training with manuals'? Or that someone else has a 1996 patent for a computerized data representation technique we all know as 'pie charts'? These are two extreme examples cited in this short article describing some of the U.S. Patent Office's larger errors. More...

A Crash Course on E-Learning Portals

Introductory article on the topic of online learning portals. The article stresses the need for the portals to be platform neutral, especially from the point of view of the user. More...

How to Evaluate a Content Management System

Nice article that presents a fairly complete step-by-step account of how to evaluate a content management system. More...

Let Them Eat IT: The Myth of the Global Village as an Interactive Utopia
I will be upfront and admit that I am a McLuhanist. Communications technology extends our senses and this to a large degree eliminates spatial boundaries, bringing communication (and hence information and empowerment) to humanity as a whole, not just to the world's elites. More...

Celestia

Cool: Celestia is an 3D space simulation for Unix and Win32 that lets you travel through the solar system, to the stars, and even beyond the galaxy. More...

Object Lessons: Towards an Educational Theory of Technology
This article starts out sounding like a restatement of the standard David Noble refrain: that there is a great push toward integrating technology into education, and that the purpose of this is to turn education into a commodity. As I have observed elsewhere, there is a point to this claim, but we should not confuse the use of technology with the drive to create a for-profit commercial education system. More...

Globalization of Information: Intellectual Property Law Implications

Survey article reflecting the trends toward more stringent and global harmonization of copyright legislation. More...

Transforming the Way We Learn: A Vision for the Future of ICT in Schools
Well meaning but bland government report pesented by British Secretary of State for Education and Skills Estelle Morris. Clearly labled as NOT government policy, the report outlines a vision of the use of technology in British schools, including a 'day in the life' of a typical student which looks a lot like traditional schooling but incorporates elements of technology assisted instruction, independent learning (in standard one hour blocks) and access to online resources. More...

RDF Declarative Description (RDD): A Language for Metadata
Technical paper proposing an extension to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) representation of information in XML. The purpose of RDD is to provide an extended set of logical relations between entities, such as transitivity, symmetry of relations and inverse relations. More...