A Special Request
My thanks to the many people who have sent me notes describing the impact of our work here at the NRC e-learning group. For those who missed the request sent out Sunday (that is, text, RSS and Javascript feed subscribers), there is still time to send me an email. More...

User Registration Need Not Be Inevitable
I have long complained about user registration in news sites - readers may have notice that (with the New York Times excepted) I do not link from OLDaily to sites that require user registration. More...

Colleges Reach out Via Instant Messaging
This would be a good starting point for a case study were somebody doing more in depth work in the use of instant messaging in e-learning (this article is itself pretty superficial). It describes how Boston University's admission counselors use instant messaging to field questions from prospective students about admissions procedures, college life or the status of their application. More...

Requirements for a CLO
To short for an article, too long for an OLDaily item, but worth keeping around - the Learning Circuit blog is a perfect place for things like these (and I need to keep remembering than I have access to it). Anyhow, I was asked today to list the attributes a CLO would need to have and to demonstrate to a hiring committee... here's what I came up with. By Stephen Downes, Learning Circuits Blog, June 25, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Welcome to TextChoice
This is pretty interesting. The announcement of this Thomson product, TextChoice2, carried in University Business, notes that it "features a digital database of content that teachers and professors can use to create customized materials." The interface is unfortunately quite slow and it's not really user-friendly, but if you dig a bit what you'll find is that they divided up their texts into 10 or 12 page chunks, which you can select and arrange into your own 'custom text'. More...

IP Telephony Cookbook
Now online, "the IP Telephony Cookbook was developed as the final deliverable of the TERENA IP Telephony project as a reference document for setting up IP Telephony solutions at university campuses and NRENs." Most people aren't going to want to read this document, but it is required reading for system administrators (so forward this link their way). More...

FCKeditor
OK, first of all: it's the author's initials (though perhaps an unfortunate choice of names). That said, this is really neat: an open-source cross-platform HTML textarea text formatter that works with ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Java and more. More...

The Location Field Is the New Command Line
This is a follow-up to an item run here a few days ago, How Microsoft Lost the API War. It has me thinking a lot more about web applications. I have been touting the web as the source of content for a long time now (in contrast, say, to standards designed to accomodate local media, such as CD-ROMs). More...

Codec Comparison
Oh, I don't know. Maybe somebody, some day, will need a detailed description of video coder-decoders (codecs). Well, here it is, describing varions of AVI, Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG (Real format forthcoming) in quite a bit of (technical) detail. More...

Information and Communications Technologies in Schools Survey
More than 97 percent of Canadian schools have internet access, with the schools averaging one computer for every five students, according to this new study by Industry Canada. The bulk of these computers use "always-on" internet connections (as compared to dial-up, but a nice euphemism that masks whether or not the connections are high-speed). More...