ERIC gets $34.6 million upgrade
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), a repository of 16 separate clearinghouses for educational journals and abstracts, gets a new lease on life with this multimillion contract to a private agency. More...
Learning Object Metadata (The Buntine Oration - Reflection 3)
Albert Ip offers his third (or fourth) post in response to my learning Networks talk in Perth, looking this time at metadata. As with his previous posts, there is a great deal of resonance between his views and mine. More...
Lost Under the Streetlight
The author argues that colleges and universities should not be held responsible for file sharing. The case, if you will, seems pretty clear cut: "the RIAA reports that just 191 of the 5,441 individuals who have been the named targets of RIAA P2P lawsuits over the past few years are based on college campuses, using campus networks." He asks, "how long before the media industries and members of Congress focus their public comments and copyright efforts on the consumer ISPs?" The answer is, of course, as soon as the RIAA can get the softer targets - the colleges and universities - to comply. More...
Cendant Sues Amazon Over Book Recommendations
We have another entrant in the litigation lottery as yet another obscure company that produced essentially nothing with whatever knowledge it had claims to have invented and patented the idea of recommender systems and has launched a lawsuit. More...
One-Minute Site
The contents of this manifesto should need to be repeated, but a scan of the web shows that companies (and educational institutions, and governments) continue to fail to follow its sage advice. In a nutshell: remove the fancy animations, the corporate advertising, and the press release talk, and make your company's people the focus of your website. More...
Experiences from the Use of Skolelinux: Use of OpenSource Software at Four Norwegian Schools
The nice thing about open source is that you can adapt it to your own needs. Hence the emergence of Skolelinux, a Linux distribution for Norwegian schools. This article describes the deployment of the softare in four schools. More...
Perl 6 Grammars and Regular Expressions
Articles like this constitute a fun read for me, but unless you are one of the many developers awaiting Perl 6 you won't get a lot from it. For me, though, there's nothing like a good regular expression parser, the topic of this surface look at one of Perl 6's central features. More...
Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software
Interesting look at the problem of designing social software for groups (as opposed to for collections of individuals). Most of the discussion looks at means of addressing flaming - of course, my interest these days is in squelching spam. I am still not convinced that push technologies - such as emails, discussion boards, and the like - can withstand the influence of these pests. Sure, if you have a large enough group, like Wikipedia or Slashdot, you can stamp out abuse. More...
More on Blogging Referee Reports and Hacking Peer Review
Just to be clear - I am in the camp that believes that we should do away with prior-to-publication peer review. That said, Seb Paquet explores the concept of blogging peer reviews in this short item. More...
College Students Encouraged to 'Define the Line'
The new Define the Line website, announced today by the Business Software Alliance, is a condescending attempt by its backers to discourage file sharing through fear (you might get a virus) and intimidation (file sharing is stealing, stealing is a crime, ergo...) and even self-interest (file sharing costs jobs, one of which may be yours). The survey published along with the site, though (click on 'Research'), shows massive support in the student population for file sharing and attitudes ranging from indifference to support among the professors. More...
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