RIT press to be on-demand
Rochester Institute of Technology's Cary Graphic Arts Press has signed a deal with Lulu.com to print the Institute's publication on an on-demand basis rather than as a standard press run. The plan eliminates the risk inherent with academic publishing: returns of unpurchased stock. More...

Redland RDF Language Bindings
This has been around for a while, though the Perl implementation appears to be only a couple of months old. Redland is a set of free software packages that provide support for the Resource Description Framework (RDF). It's written in C, but there are bindings to Perl, Python, PHP and more. More...

Technorati Launches Tags
There has been a lot of buzz in the last few days about Technorati Tags. Alan Levine offers a summary. More. More. Drawing on similar concepts used by Flickr and del.icio.us, the idea is that you create what amounts to a hidden link in a blog post to point to a Technorati topic: the topics, in turn, are created by users, a type of Folksonomy (if these names and terms are mysteries to you, click on the [Research] link to find more information - my own version of Tags, which I've been using for several years. More...

RSS_LOM
Work on RSS_LOM continues as Brian Sutherland offers another proposed revision. RSS_LOM has tested successfully in RSS aggregators, which means that it can be used to transport learning object metadata. Some open questions remain about the encoding of the metadata within the RSS file. More...

What Are JSON, JSON-RPC and JSON-RPC-Java?
Introducing JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), "a lightweight data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and others." JSON is the scripting language that makes things like Google's GMail so much faster than other browser-based tools. More...

Future VLE - The Visual Version
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes it's worth a lot more. This picture posted by Scott Wilson is one of the latter variety, as he nails the vision once again. More...

Skypecasting in EFL
Skype, as many of you know, is a free internet voice chat service (aka an internet telephone - and for a fee, you can call a regular telephone). With the recent advent of podcasting, attention has turned to the idea of recording Skype conversations. It can be done using Windows XP and $40 worth of software, as this article described (one day, I'm sure, it will be possible to record calls with the push of a button). Mac users, don't despair. More...

Gestion de l'information avec XML
Course on XML, written completely in XHTML and rendered using XSLT. Lots of good content with built-in quizzes (also in XHTML). In French. More...

Relative Effectiveness of Computer-based and Human Feedback for Enhancing Student Learning
The Spring, 2005, issue of the Journal of Educators Online is now available. I cite one article, this one looking at the effectiveness of computer-based feedback on test results. The not so surprising conclusion: feedback doesn't work if the students don't read it. More...