Archives

Distributed Digital Rights Management
Slides from my second presentation to the Learning Object Summit, describing the eduSource approach to digital rights management. Additional papers and slides (as well as video, even) should be available on the site shortly. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 30, 2004. More...

SNS Picking & Parsing…
This list isn't complete (missing Orkut and Flickr), but it's still a pretty good set of links to a wide variety of social software and networking sites. More...

Major Single Sign-on Work Starts in the UK and Australia
When I started work on DRM for eduSource, the demand for this sort of service was heard from some quarters. But a single signon is contrary to an open system. So, for that matter, is the sort of federated identity sharing described in this article. It requires, as the author notes, a "web of trust" - which means that participation in the network must be restricted to organizations you trust. More...

University Hits PeopleSoft with $510M Lawsuit
People who use PeopleSoft, rejoice! A university is taking the software company to court, arguing that "the student administration applications were 'vaporware' when the project began" and never did work properly. More...

Postini Antispam Patent Could Cause Headaches
So how would you feel if you could not block spam because some company received a wide-rranging patent for email filtering. Such a possibility is in the cards after the U.S. patent office granted (as usual, well after such systems were widely deployed) just such a patent. More...

Learning Goes Mobile
One of the next big things in learning - at least according to the press coverage - is what is now being called 'mobile learning' (I have always referred to it under the heading of wireless access, but mobile learning also incorporates the idea of learning on demand). This article is a good example of the story being told. More...

Making the Decision to Decentralize
This article constantly reminds readers that things are more complex than depicted, and although a good discussion of decentralization this caution is probably the key thing to keep in mind. More...

Google Personalized Search
George Siemens points to this new service from Google, personalized search. I'll link to some reviews as they come in. I did fill out the profile, which seems (I guess) to store as a cookie. More...

Signing Off
The Invisible Adjunct calls it quits - rather than face another year without anything like a career, he or she is leaving academia and finding a job that will last more than eight months. More...

Canadian Society for Training and Development
The CSTD has launched a new news feed (including RSS). "CSTD is Canada's national organization dedicated to the profession of training, workplace learning, and human resources development. More...