Online Newspapers Don't Get It
In the wake of a recent announcement that The Age, an Australian newspaper, is joining the increasing number of newspapers requiring registration, I spent some time this week griping on the Online news mailing list about how such practices were breaking the internet by creating links that mislead readers, taking them to registration pages instead of the articles they were promised. More...

Networked Learning and Networked Information
This paper contains an important message, that "integration between different environments, including those delivering information and those supporting learning, is the key requirement." The idea is that "information environments need to be closely integrated with the environments in which their users undertake their mainstream tasks and activities." These observations were reached during the course of the Evaluation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (EDNER) project described in this paper. More...

Networked Learning Conference 2004
Proceedings from the Networked Learning Conference 2004, held at Lancaster University, England, UK, April 5-7, 2004. An outstanding resource, via the E-Learning centre, this website contains the full text of dozens and dozens of papers from this large conference. More...

Ed Radio
So anyhow, today was another busy day, with only a short time available to produce the newsletter. But instead of producing the newsletter, I did this. James Farmer, you see, had this neat idea to record Ed Tech papers. It was well received, and so he started today, recording Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design by David Squires using Audacity, a free sound recorder. More...

WebJay
So of course there's a whole community around the idea of 'playlists', which is the generic term for what I created with Ed Radio. Seb pointed me to the author of this site, which takes any HTML page containing links to MP3 files and converts it to a playlist which you can play using Real or some other audio player - just what I did with Ed Radio, but (presumably) without the bugs. More...

NUTN 2004: Quality in Distance Learning
I am off to Kennebunkport, Maine, in a few minutes to speak at the National University Telecommunications Network (NUTN) annual conference. I thought going to Maine would be easy because it's just down the road - but this has turned out to be one of my more difficult trips to plan. More...

In the Land of Confusion
A nice application by Seb Fiedler of Philip Candy's 1991 Self-direction for lifelong learning to some of the confusion surrounding self-directed learning on the web. Fiedler draws on Candy's notion of "ownership" where in some cases of self-directed learning the influence of the professor may linger, while in others it is absent. More...

NMC 2004 - Who Runs the Show?
Some heat is being generated around the 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' project at NMC 2004. I can offer clarifications for my bit: all feeds harvested by Edu_RSS are used to generate the NMC 2004 coverage are listed here. Martin Terre Blanche makes this observation: "The 'don't ask me - it's somebody else's responsibility' syndrome is typical of large, centralised bureaucracies and Alan's response (in his persona as centralist faction coordinator) is therefore to be expected. However, I have to admit that it may also be a symptom of decentralisation - of small pieces loosely joined. For a user of systems made up of loosely coupled pieces it can be quite frustrating to figure out who is in charge of what." But you need to understand - my NMC continuing coverage is not part of Alan's presentation. It is a separate and parallel initiative that collaborates with his presentation. More...

Take-Off DataPoint Workshop
Robin Good explains this nicely in today's newsletter: "The Take-off RSS news reader from DataPoint gathers RSS news and sends them directly into a Microsoft Access database. From there they can be easily pulled inside one or more presentation slides. Thus, you could have fresh and updated news feeds to show on your class opening presentation slide or you could display the latest relevant stock, or future prices for the very items that you have been covering in your presentation." I haven't tried it, but it's a great concept. More...

Gurus versus Bloggers Take 2
Another fun installment of Design by Fire's 'Gurus versus bloggers' design showdown. I'll spare you the suspense: "Another shutout: Bloggers, 8. Gurus, Zilch." I'm not even slightly surprised. More...