Making E-Textbooks More Interactive
David Raths, Campus Technology, 2018/09/07
When I'm thinking of 'making textbooks more interactive' these days I'm either thinking o using them toconnect with a community, or to work with editable programs and live data, or both. But I think the idea of 'interactive' in this article takes us back to the days in the 1990s when 'interactive' meant 'you can push a button to play a video' or some such thing. Anyhow, all this 'interactivity' requires an Apple platform to operate. More...

How to effectively build and leverage a personal learning network (PLN)
Paul A. Kirschner, Mirjam Neelen, 3-Star Learning Experiences, 2018/09/04
It's interesting top see an article about networking from the prototypical proponents of direct instruction. But here it is. "We define," they write, "a PLN as a trusted network of current and former colleagues or other people that are valuable to you as a professional or in other areas of your life.... The value of a PLN lies in the fact that the people in it provide access to the knowledge and expertise necessary for you to better perform your role." So, OK then. More...

I second that emoji: The standards, structures, and social production of emoji
Bethany Berard, First Monday, 2018/09/03
First Monday has devoted this month's issue to the Emoji, from which I select two articles to highlight. This article describes how candidate emoji are propossed and approved by the Unicode Consortium. " Unicode’s codespace has 1,114,112 code points. While Unicode Standard 11 contains just over 137,300 characters, there are a finite number of code points." This has led over the years for the encoding not only of minority languages, but also for the inclusion of a wide set of cultural touchpoints in the unicode emoji specification itself. More...

Learning Technology Workshop CEN/ISSS WSLT
Overview of activities by Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN), presented at the International Open Forum on E-Learning and Standards which, among other things, endorses the WSIS goal of "a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge." Three cheers. More...

Submit and View Problem Reports
IMS is undertaking a review of the IMS Learner Information Package v1.0 and Accessibility for LIP v1.0 specifications. This web site has been set up to collect problems, and if you're curious (like me), this site lets you view the publicly available problem descriptions. More...

Low-tech Case Has High-tech Impact
Good analysis of a recent decision by a Canadian court on copyright law, one which, while it asserts that case summaries are subject to copyright (as they should be, since summarization is creative work - I know), a wide latitude ought to be granted to assessment of fair dealing (a.k.a. fair use), essentially fashioning "exceptions to copyright infringement as new copyright rights — users' right — that must be balanced against the rights of copyright owners and creators." Moreover, the court also "allows the providers of equipment to presume their equipment will be used lawfully," a ruling that makers of software that might be used to infringe - such as Kazaa - would welcome. More...

Novell Sets Sights on 'Complete Linux Desktop'
Some people have been asking how my Linux project is going. I have been meaning to write it up, but you know how it is. My office and home desktops are Linux, as is my wife's desktop. My web server is, of course, Linux. My laptop remains Windows because no wireless internet driver is available for the special Dell built-in wireless PCI. More...

The Guerra Scale
You will notice, at the very bottom of the Guerra scale of levels of user experience, at the worst level possible, is PDF. So of course I'm going to cite this paper, no matter what else it says. More...

PEI (Pigeon Enabled Internet) is FASTER then ADSL
One of the very first links I ever ran - it even predates my current file system - was regarding the CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol). It was eleven years before this important protocol was implemented by the Bergen Linux Users group. Today, it was established that carrier pigeons are faster than ADSL. More...

Shareable State Persistence
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. has released the IMS Shareable State Persistence v1.0 Public Draft Specification. The idea here is that if you have state information in a content object - for example, the number of the last page a reader was looking at - and you need to store it somewhere, then you need a mechanism for knowing where you've stored it. More...