Skull Wallpaper Virus Attacks Nokia Smart-phones
Sure, it's just another virus story - a bug embedded in a wallpaper file disables most features on a Nokia phone and inserts skulls and bones as wallpaper. The bigger picture: file sharing on mobile phones was always considered to be blocked by the fact that the content provider had complete control over the hardware. More...
Thomson Acquires Third of ContentGuard
Something like this is no real surprise - ContentGuard had been under pressure from regulators for being too concentrated in the hands of Microsoft and Time Warner. I'm not sure the addition of the publishing giant Thomson will change anything, but the partners no doubt hope it will. Here is the ContentGuard press release on the acquisition and a wholly frivolous press release on Thomson's licensing of ContentGuard patents (If I buy the rights to print this article from myself, can I write a press release too? Sheesh...). More...
BlogExplosion
As described on Joho: "I'm trying out BlogExplosion, a free service designed to build traffic on your site. Click on a button on the site and it sends you to one of its member's sites. More...
Charter Schools Fall Short in Public Schools Matchup
People opting for charter schools to improve learning may want to think twice as a study released by the U.S. Department of Education shows they perform less well than the public system. A proponent of charter schools, however, argues that this shortfall is due to their targeting disadvantaged students. More...
Learning Object Repository Software
Review and comparison of six learning object repositoriy solutions: HarvestRoad Hive, Intrallect Intralibrary, NorthPlains Telescope Enterprise, Ex Libris Digitool, Concord Masterfile and Dspace. The products are compared on a matrix of 44 features and 10 feature groupings. More...
When Plagiarism's Shadow Falls on Admired Scholars
Rip. Mix. Burn. Two Harvard professors are caught with unattributed remix content in their books. Piracy? Plagiarism? Of course not - it was all an oversight. The punishment? "'The discovery is the punishment,' Professor Gillers said." Sure. Let's punish students in the same way, then, or underground remix artists. More...
Every Ontology is a Treaty
The latest issue of SIGSEMIS: Semantic Web and Information Systems is out - and once again, I am forced to ask why a semantic web organization can't publish their journal in XML, or at least HTML, instead of the decidedly non-semantic PDF. Anyhow, the highlight is this issue is the interview with Tom Gruber, well known for his work on ontologies. More...
Ads Making Overtures in RSS
Some discussion of recent moves by companies like Overture, the search advertising division of Yahoo, which is working with Feedburner, to insert ads into RSS feeds. There are only a few places ads could be inserted into feeds; these services insert them at the source as they offer to create RSS feeds for you. More. More. The only other place, really, is in the RSS reader - and with 640 different readers available, that's not really a reliable placement. More...
Global Learn Day: GLD8 Educational Technologists Talk Online
My contribution to Global Learn Day is available as an MP3 audio feed (2.9 M) - I talk about the Firefox launch, the emergence of blogging in the Yukon, and the spirit that lies behind all this - the idea that we could provide learning to everyone in the world (please note the sound is bad for three minutes during the introduction, then my talk comes out very clearly). Another recording of my talk (by Robin Good) is available here. Robin Good also contributed a useful presentation to the event, Ten Technologies That Are Going To Change The Way We Learn - search technologies, data visualization tools, blogs, audio and video, RSS, P2P, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth (Wifi, WiMax), real time collaboration tools, and collective and collaborative filtering. By Stephen Downes and Robin Good, Stephen's Web, Robin Good, November 22, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...
Blogs, RSS and Other Cool Stuff
People seem to like that title. They also like the presentation, which covers everything from content management systems, blogs, wikis and RSS. The MP3 audio of my session Friday in Whitehorse, Yukon, is available online. The main link above points to my Yukon photos, which you can use to decorate your desktops, slides or web pages. On Saturday I went hiking at Miles canyon in the Yukon wilderness with fellow photographer and former RCMP officer Hank Moorlag, who offers his photographs of the day (including one of me on a cliff). Don't miss his other set of Yukon photos. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, November 22, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...
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