By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LG Licenses ContentGuard's Patent Portfolio
LG has officially gone over to the dark side as it takes out a license for ContentGuard's digital rights management (DRM) 'technology'. What the move more accurately signals, probably, is a desire for closer relations with the companies that own ContentGuard, including Microsoft, Time Warner and Thomson. This article is eager to argue how smart the deal is for both LG and ContentGuard. While it does indeed signal the end of a very long drough for ContentGuard (which has gone nowhere trying to get royalties from the Open Mobile Alliance, which uses the Open Digital Rights Language), it is rather less so for LG, which now needs to convince others to agree to pay for licensing or else work at a disadvantage. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ePortfolios, Distributed Storage and Personal Repository Caches
Tony Hirst opines on the future of storage and repositories. "Search based navigation - or content rediscovery - will become increasingly common as desktop search becomes as fast as Google search (which is the case in Vista). How this will affect the way in which users mentally organise their content is unclear to me..." I also like the concept of 'found storage' - it's kind of like the way the carrying bag on my bicycle seems to have become the permanent home for some of my tools. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Meredith Henson[Edit][Delete]: ePortfolio Project and Mahara Update, Eduforge [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
The ePortfolio project called Mahara has released its first iteration on EduForge, with a second to follow shortly. Documentation for the project , includingy a PowerPoint presentation. You can can also learn about the project here and at a post on Seb Schmoller's website. 'Mahara' is Te Reo Maori for "`thought' (think, memory, think upon, remember). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: ePortfolio: EduTools ePortfolio Review, WCET EduTools [Edit][Delete] December 13, 2006
Helen Barrett reports, "The WCET EduTools study of seven ePortfolio tools has been completed and is online." Pretty good review, with descriptive accounts of the features. The site also has financial profiles of each of the companies (ANGEL ePortfolio, BB ePortfolio, eFolio, ePortfolio.org, LiveText, Open Source Portfolio/rSmart and TaskStream). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens[Edit][Delete]: Eportfolio 2006, October 7, 2006
George Siemens is preparing an upcoming talk in a wiki. If I were mean, I would pull a Stephen Colbert and see if we couldn't convert george's keynote to repeated utteraqnces of "I am a sheep." Would George say that if that's what the wiki said? Anyhow, Siemens writes in his newsletter, "My "keynote written in a wiki" experiment is progressing well for some projects (and not so well for others). The eportfolio 2006 wiki (for London, next week) has generated some useful dialogue on whether portfolios should be conversation-driven or content-based. The feedback from individuals is a surprisingly enjoyable experience...compared to my usual 'develop the keynote in the dark. More...