6 septembre 2018

Blackboard Building Blocks Developer Conference
David Carter-Tod is doing a fine job of blogging the Blackboard Building Blocks conference, despite his struggles with Internet Explorer. The conference is intended for developers of open source tools and utilities related to Blackboard. There is also a dedicated blog for the conference, but in the blogging game, experience shows. More...

Extending RSS 2.0 With Namespaces
This is a very nice description of what a namespace is and why they are necessary. The idea of a namespace is that it allows you to extend the vocabulary of an XML file. So, for example, if you are not satisfied with the choices an RSS feed or a learning object metadata (LOM) gives you, add some of your own. More...

Adobe's Robert McDaniels Responds (Again) to Nielsen Criticisms of PDF
The author responds point by point but I'm afraid the responses are not convincing. McDaniels writes, for example, "your second article that has mentioned excessive crashing, with no link to a study or evidence to support it." Though I have not actually counted the times it has happened to me, I can personally attest to the number of crashes. More...

Son of Napster: One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change
This is a devious, underhanded plan that would skewer the music industry and which is, probably, currently legal. At the core of the plan is this line of reasoning: individuals have the right to copy CDs that they own for backup purposes. So, to allow many people to copy the same CD, share the ownership of the CD. This is it; the rest is all implementation. More...

National Culture and Philosophies of Learning
Nice article that looks at some of the early failures of e-learning and attributes them to the ways different cultures approach knowledge and learning. More...

Stories of Adult Learning
I enjoyed this article, which isn't really a set of stories so much as an extended account of why it is that you have to have some idea of what you're going to do with a technology before actually installing it in a learning environment. More...

Schools Rebuke Music Biz Demands
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College have refused the music industry's demands that they reveal the names of students suspected of file sharing. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: the schools' objections are procedural, not principled. More...

OriginalWorks
This is interesting. I described last week a system that allows you to publish your own book online. Well, XanEdu is today marketing a system called OriginalWorks, a system that "specializes in publishing academic work for use in your classroom, transforming your own personal work into a professional, high quality book," according to the mailout. More...

Mind of a Teacher
Steven Pinker talks about reaction to his online course, offers reflections on contemporary pedagogy ("Too often, he says, teaching is based on presenting and analysing flaws and contradictions in research data"), and levels some scathing criticism of academic publishers ("[Journal publishers] add virtually zero value, don't pay editors or writers, and make a fortune. More...

RFID Chips Are Here
Two major items make this article worth a read. The first is the clearest evidence yet that RFID tags are upon us. If WalMart is interested, everybody is interested. The second is a very clear description of some of the implications of RFID. An RFID tag embedded, say, in a pair of jeans follows the product for its entire lifetime, broadcasting its unique identity. More...