Buy Notebooks, Not Desktops
Good advice for schools considering hardware purchases. Desktop computers don't move around, but students and instructors do. And notebooks today are relatively inexpensive and powerful enought to handle just about any computing need. More...

LearnKey Signs Agreement With RealNetworks
Online learning meets streaming video. Just another 'strategic alliance' meeting (one of dozens that hit the press release tabs every day), but this one is more interesting than usual: LearnKey has signed an agreement to deliver learning material through Real Media. More...

Gorilla Warfare
"Big names from outside the training world are lining up to become the 800-pound gorilla in the e-learning market," suggests this article. And what follows is an interesting survey of the interest and efforts generated from four different sectors: the consulting sector, the resource planning sector, tech firms and retailers. Nobody has found the key yet, but the summer of 2002 should see some winners begin to emerge, according to the article. And the likely winners will be "companies like Siebel and Oracle and Microsoft buying the LMS vendors. More...

Copy Controls and Circumvention: Don't Get Around Much Any More
A clear article written for the non-lawyer summing the opposition (at least in the case of 2600, a hacker magazine that posted links to DeCSS DVD decryption software) to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). More...

Distributed Computing Case Ends With Probation
You may have read in OLDaily a few weeks ago about the case where a computer administrator faces heavy fines and long jail terms for installing a distributed processing system on school computers. Well, the case is over, he was - astonishingly - found guilty and given a year of probation and a $2,100 fine. More...

Modeling Units of Study From a Pedagogical Perspective: The Pedagogical meta-Model Behind EML
EML stands for Educational Modeling Language and it is a DTD-based learning object metadata framework based in the Netherlands. EML is designed to answer, in part, the question, "Where is the learning in e-learning?" Their answer is simple to state, but entails a significant development program. More...

Against the 3A’s of EdTech: AI, Analytics, and Adaptive Technologies in Education
Maha Bali, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/12/06
"I agree with all of Audrey Watters‘, Chris Gilliard’s, Autumm Caines’ and Benjamin Doxtdator’s critiques on these topics (also: it’s scary how my Google docs app immediately recommended their websites when I started inserting the links here)," writes Maha Bali. More...

Bell Leads on Radical Proposal for CRTC-Backed Mandatory Website Blocking System
Michael Geist, 2017/12/06
Michael Geist has a couple of posts on "a coalition that plans to file a proposal with the CRTC that would lead to the creation a mandatory website blocking system in Canada." It would be run not by the courts but by "a new “Internet Piracy Review Agency”, envisions the creation of mandatory block lists without judicial review to be enforced by the CRTC." This is a bad idea, he writes, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the purpose of such a blocking mechanism would evolve from obvious cases. More...