Course Design Factors Influencing The Success Of Online Learning
This is only a single study, and so the usual disclaimers apply about the applicability of its findings, but the authors point of an interesting and strong correlation between student satisfaction with an online course and the degree of interactivity in the course. More...

Recognizing Prior (Informal) Learning
George Siemens observes that "The lines between work and learning are blurred to the point where they are no longer separate activities, but activities with vital connections that feed into and direct each other." This is a point I have repeatedly tried to make to educators (most recently at CADE this week) in an effort to argue that the design of online learning must change accordingly. More...

RSS Links
The history of RSS as a collection of links (which are available via archive) between March, 1999 and August, 2000. For the record, it is worth noting that Dave Winer - who now touts himself as the "co-author" of RSS - reacted to the original Netscape announcement in 1999 by slamming the company, attacking its lawyers, criticizing the the implementation, and by launching his own version, the Userland format, thereby producing the first fork of RSS within a couple of days of its announcement. More...

Stopping Time
It's a little like Zeno's Paradox: you can divide time over and over again until you reach... attoseconds. For the record, an attosecond is a slice of time equal to 10^-18 seconds. What happens in such a short time. More...

Interact
Eventually the deluge of free alternatives is going to have an impact on the commercial products. From the accouncement on SEUL: "Description: Interact is an online learning and collaboration platform that was developed by the Christchurch College of Education. It is a free alternative to the likes of WebCT and Blackboard, and was designed with the intention of making it easy for students and lecturers to interact online, and focuses on constructivist and Vygotskian views of teaching and learning." Oh, and if you need more, it can act as a full portal, not just an LMS. More...

The Inquiry Page
Interesting site forwarded to me by John which allows people (especially students) to post questions, which are answered by an ever-growing number of community members. More...

Blogging a Chore to Students?
Oliver Wrede responds to my comments on his essay Weblogs and Discourse (where I observe that many students will not want to blog). More...

Emotions in the Cyber Classroom
We saw yesterday discussion about the role emotion plays in learning. We have also seen, from time to time in my work, discussions of meaning, for example, when I talk about how people attach different meanings, and different importance to, the same learning objects. This interesting paper connects the cots. More...

When Good Technology Goes Bad
I'm not sure I would call videoconferencing 'good technology' but this article, which examines what to do when your videoconferencing fails, provides some good advice. From rooms being reserved for other purposes to audio problems to camera issues, this author has seen (almost) everything that can go wrong. More...

Neuroscience Speaks for Practice-Oriented Learning
(If you don't speak Danish, look for the flag icon for an English version.) This very interesting article falls under the heading of brain-based learning and makes the point that there are non-textual, emotion-based processes of memory that operate unconsciously. More...