Community Engagement Techniques and Tools
What should be noted in this chart is the big orange arrow designating "increasing level of public impact" for the various collaboration tools described. Below the arrow is a grid with many tools familiar to educators: plain old content sits at the lowest level, serving only to inform, while more interactive tools engender greater empowerment, right up to the point where citizens make decisions for themselves. More...

Democracy, Community, and Youth Activism in K-12 Schooling
One of the major arguments for a public education system is that society has a stake in instilling certain values in its citizens, and in particular, citizenship and democracy. But what does that mean. More...

WebCT and MERLOT Form Strategic Partnership to Energize Inter-Institution Learning Content Exchange
The deal means specifically that "MERLOT will offer 'WebCT' as a pick list option for users searching by either subject matter or technical format." Consequently, "They will pinpoint WebCT-ready content produced by faculty, institutions and publishers, including IMS standards-based learning modules, question databases and quizzes." One wonders, in the world where learning objects are supposed to be system-neutral, why it should be necessary to search for 'WebCT ready' content. More...

Manage Digital Rights with the OMA
Good overview article on digital rights management as seem through the eyes of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), the consortium that handles content for mobile devices such as cell (mobile) phones. More...

E-Learning Benchmark Established with Launch of the Institute of Financial Services' KnowledgeBank
The corporate community is often well ahead of the academic community in the deployment of e-learning technologies, and this announcement is a case in point. What is significant about this item is this: "RetrievalWare enables the retrieval of very specific information by 'slicing-and-dicing' search results using dynamic classification - the ability to mix concepts, terms and expressions across multiple categories to quickly isolate desired information." The key here is the concept of 'dynamic categoization' - the automated sorting of items into categories in real time. More...

Where To Find Great Images For Your Site
Robin Good is recommending FotoSearch, but I have to warn, the photos here cost a fortune (even the 'free' photos have shipping charges, and are free only if you spend a certain amount of money). More...

Contextualized Learning: Empowering Education
This article identifies three major features that will characterize contextual learning: a greater emphasis on organizational learning; learners that will be increasingly empowered to shape when, where and how they learn; and ways to deliver learning embedded into the job. More...

BSA Explains its Ethos
Referring to Business Software Alliance studies that routinely inflate the cost of file sharing, the BSA VP Bob Kruger argues, "I haven't seen where anyone's pointed out anything about the methodology they disagree with." This despite numerous published complaints about exactly that point. More...

Interaction and Immediacy in Online Learning
The authors' key point is that "Interaction alone... is insufficient to create a positive social dynamic in the online classroom." An important mediating element, argue the authors, is "immediacy," which is "the extent to which selected communicative behaviors enhance physical or psychological closeness in interpersonal communication" and "immediacy is both a consequence of interaction and a contributor to it." The implication is that immediacy enhances interaction, but one would be hard pressed to draw this conclusion explicity in this paper. More...

Growing Virtual Communities
It is impossible to ignore IRRODL, and the current edition is no exception, containing work on blended learning and interaction. And although the content are well chosen, this issue is a bit choppier than usual. Take, for example, this article. a discussion of the development of online communities, that begins with section Xxxiv. More...