State High School Exit Exams: A Maturing Reform
The Center on Education Policy yesterday released its third annual report on state high school exit exams. The author reports that student outcomes are largely unchanged from last year. More...

Multiply's Spam-O-matic UI
I got my first invite from yet another social network (YASN) called Multiply (if you want an invitation, send me an email). What makes this site different is the much more obvious capacity to create blog content (still a centralized silo mode, but still, one step closer to the semantic social network). More...

There's One Born Every Minute
Brief report about eReader's offer of 250 public domain ebooks for $995 (for $1,495 you can get 500 titles). The author points out, quite rightly, that you can obtain these titles for free online at the Gutenberg Project. More...

Assessing Understanding With Multiple-Choice Questions
A couple of short posts on writing multiple choice questions to evaluate not just knowledge, but also understanding and evaluation. More...

Protestant Majority Slips: A Sign of Things to Come in the LMS Wars
In what must be the oddest lede to ever mark an article on e-learning, this author introduces the coming diversity in LMS solutions available to colleges and universities by analogy with the apparently increasing diversity of religion in the United States. More...

Learning Technology Newsletter
The July 2004 issue of IETF's Learning Technology newsletter is now available but published only in PDF, making it impossible to link to specific articles. More...

Our Education System is Lacking Competitive Assessment
I confess that I don't understand the faith that competition always produces the best result. Cooperation often makes more sense. If you and I both want to go to Adelaide, the most efficient thing for us to do is to share a car, not to race. I think education is an area where cooperation, rather than competition, is more efficient. More...

List Feeds
Just for fun, and in view of some recent discussion, I have created an RSS 2.0 feed for IT FORUM. I have also created a feed for DEOS-L. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 13, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

'Stealing Songs is Wrong' Lessons Head for UK Schools
As this article sardonically observes, "The [British] government seems to be falling hook, line and sinker for the curious notion that you need to understand that downloading music is stealing before you can possibly learn about, to make and to enjoy music." Being less obscure, I would observe that this is the plain placement of propaganda in the classroom. More...

Expertise Finders: Pollard Goes Looking for Answers
George Siemens points to this item by Dave Pollard in which he asks, "How can we ever hope to produce effective Expertise Finders when we can't even get people in our own organizations to keep their personal information up to date?" It's what I try to convince people of in my own projects, that input is critical, and everything else is gravy. More...