Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion?
A few days ago I ran coverage of a story, first covered in New Scientist, about ChatNannies, conversational robots designed to counter pedophiles in chat rooms. It was fun to speculate for a bit, but now this article (and various others) suggest that the software is an elaborate hoax. 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...
U.S. Online Gambling Policy Violates Law, W.T.O. Rules
American legislation banning overseas online casinos is illegal, the World Trade Organization has ruled. As this article notes, the ruling "has ignited a political, cultural and legal tinderbox" that will have repercussions well beyond the field of online gambling. More...
A People, Once Liberated...
I hesitate to pass this along, because it expresses more emotion than content. In DEOS, Steve Eskow has been on a month long rail against the detrimental effects of what he calls the commercialization of learning - which, it seems to me, he believes includes any use of technology or non-traditional pedagogy. In response to this post, in which he stresses "the need to protect from destruction and disappearance those aspects of the present order that were valuable" (i.e., traditional classroom based teacher-led learning), I express not only my feelings but also some anger at the expression of a view which dismisses, in my view, the legitimate aspirations of those seeking access to higher education. More...
Company Claims to Own Online Testing
The article on the Chronicle site is behind a subscription wall, but coverage is provided on PoliTechBot. In a nutshell, a company is claiming to have obtained patents for testing over the internet. The company, Test Central Inc., says that it doesn't own patents on every sort of testing, but the patents they do hold are very broad - excessively so, say some. More...
Don't Steal This Book
The textbook industry is beginning to suffer the effects of file sharing, as evidenced in this shrill article from the Chronicle deploring this new type of 'piracy'. Actually, the copying isn't all that new - I saw Chinese reproductions of texts a good 20 years ago. It's the WTO regulations to counter copying that are new. More...
Live TV on Your Cell Phone
From Poynter's E-Media Tidbits: "The new service of Telefónica Móvil -- live TV on your cell phone -- was introduced in Chile with full print ad pages in major Chilean newspapers. The TV signal belongs to Televisión Nacional, and it is coded in RealONE. More...
Nottingham City e-Games
For those of you interested in games and learning, you may want to follow up this link sent to me by Ben Straw, who notes that Nottingham City e-Games is a project "which uses the vehicle of computer games to get kids otherwise disengaged with learning back into school and back on track with school work." The site is a bit sparse, but you can find some reports in the resources section. More...
Re: Major Single Sign-On
I don't usually link to my own discussion list (though I have plans to one day include discussion contents in the OLDaily newsletter itself - if you have comments on this, I'd love to hear them), but CETIS's Scott Wilson offers an important clarification of a link I posted earlier, noting that proposed authentication systems are not, as I described them, federated authentication. More...
Distributed Digital Rights Management
Slides from my second presentation to the Learning Object Summit, describing the eduSource approach to digital rights management. Additional papers and slides (as well as video, even) should be available on the site shortly. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 30, 2004. More...
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