What's The Fuss About RSS
Some great stuff happening in preparation for Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D'arcy Norman's talk about RSS and learning objects at the MERLOT conferent in August. The three of them are using blogs, wikis and RSS to plan and prepare their presentation ahead of the conference; the summary so far is outstanding, easily the best compilation of resources on the subject so far, and getting better with community-wide feedback. More...

Brasilien: CD-Käufer gewinnt Klage wegen störendem Kopierschutz
A Brazilian man sued EMI and won damages after a CD he purchased would not play in his car CD player. The article is in German (as the title suggests). More...

Goodbye Bar Codes: Packages With transmitters on the Way
The press is abuzz with news about RFIDs - Readio Frequency Indetifiers - that will start appearing in products in stores this fall. The article predicts that RFIDs will replace bar codes with two decades; I predict it will be a lot sooner. More...

Shibboleth v1.0 Software Available
The Internet2 consortium has announced the availability of Shibboleth 1.0, the first production version of the software. The purpose of Shibboleth is to allow a user registered at one site to obtain authenticated access to resources at another site. More...

Making Decisions About Open Source Software (OSS) for K-12
This set of resources offers a nice step by step tour through the arguments for and against the use of open source software in schools. It is a balanced presentation - sometimes annoyingly so - and is presented in such a way as to allow administrators decide what is important. More...

The LOM RDF binding
Presentations and draft meeting minutes for the IEEE learning Technology Subcommittee meetings held in Chicago a couple of weeks ago are now online. More...

Blogger API Update
Change continues to sweep the blogging and RSS development community as Blogger (recently purchased by Google) announces that it is abandoning its old XML-RPC based application program interface (API) and is developing a new protocol based on SOAP. More...

The Relation between Ontologies and Schema-languages: Translating OIL-specifications in XML-Schema
"Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems," writes the author. A schema, meanwhile, "provides [the] basic vocabulary and predefined structuring mechanisms for providing information in XML." Consequently, "Ontologies applied to on-line information source may be seen as explicit conceptualizations that describe the semantics of the data." In other words, a schema defines what properties an object can have, while an ontology specifies the possibile values of those properties. More...

Copying Troubles a Hiccup for Linux Festival
This is ridiculous. According to this item (via elearnspace), CD copiers declined to create copies of Linux distributions because of copyright agreements. The excuse offered was that the SCO case created an issue. Then it was argued that the owner of the CDs could not prove they had the rights. More...

Interoperability in Practice at the CETIS / LTScotland Codebash
The purpose of this event, held yesterday in Bangor (Wales), was "to test the theory of educational technology interoperability standards in practice by exchanging as many instances of IMS Content Packaging (including SCORM compliant ones) and IMS Question and Test Interoperability as possible." The article could have given us a better indication of the result. More...