After 40 Years' Work, Gravity Experiment Will Get Off The Ground
When you watch a lifetime's work, a $700 million 40-year-old project, blast off on a rocket, you get a little nervous. But no matter what the result, I have nothing but admiration for the sort of dedication it has taken to make this project a reality. More...

Is Google the Future of E-mail?
Good discussion of the implications and issues surrounding Google's new email service, GMail. I was interested to see the discussion about the implications for privacy in this new service, since Declan and I exchanged a few emails about this last week. More...

Will Publishers Perish?
"Many authors," offers this article, "have become frustrated with conventional publishers, entrenched by market projections, annual styles and the unmentionable word 'returns.'" Count me among them, not because I don't think I could get a 'real book' published, but because I don't care to sign my life away to do it. More...

25 Years of Ed Tech: Themes & Conclusions
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2018/09/05
Martin Weller wraps up his review of the recent history of ed tech with some review and conclusions. Some of the themes are no surprise at all - education is a slow-moving, conservative and ponderous industry that will resist pretty much any change that comes along. Meanwhile, proponents of ed tech come from other industries, don't know the history, and make the same mistakes over and over. And yet, despite this, innovation happens. More...

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
Good article that takes the time to clearly explain concepts like taxonomies and ontologies before going on to a more extended discussion of topic maps and their relation to metadata. More...

A People, Once Liberated...
I hesitate to pass this along, because it expresses more emotion than content. In DEOS, Steve Eskow has been on a month long rail against the detrimental effects of what he calls the commercialization of learning - which, it seems to me, he believes includes any use of technology or non-traditional pedagogy. In response to this post, in which he stresses "the need to protect from destruction and disappearance those aspects of the present order that were valuable" (i.e., traditional classroom based teacher-led learning), I express not only my feelings but also some anger at the expression of a view which dismisses, in my view, the legitimate aspirations of those seeking access to higher education. More...

Live TV on Your Cell Phone
From Poynter's E-Media Tidbits: "The new service of Telefónica Móvil -- live TV on your cell phone -- was introduced in Chile with full print ad pages in major Chilean newspapers. The TV signal belongs to Televisión Nacional, and it is coded in RealONE. More...

Re: Major Single Sign-On
I don't usually link to my own discussion list (though I have plans to one day include discussion contents in the OLDaily newsletter itself - if you have comments on this, I'd love to hear them), but CETIS's Scott Wilson offers an important clarification of a link I posted earlier, noting that proposed authentication systems are not, as I described them, federated authentication. More...

New Learning Models Under Scrutiny
Discussion of the emergence of e-learning as an accepted form of learning in the corporate community. The article looks at the increasing demands for accountability, as purchasers of e-learning look for evidence of the success of the new model. More...