Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School
Nice bit of visioning. "At around 7:05, Tom uses his personal Intrablog to upload an assignment on symbolism for his major American literature class. When he opens up the document online to check it, he Furls that too with his English login and it gets sent to a separate Web page set up on the English site for American Literature Best Practices. The rest of the American Lit teachers will get an automatic e-mail later in the day notifying them of his published “learning object” that they can use in their own classes." Of course, the problem is, after this nice productive morning the teacher has to travel to a school and spend a full day teaching the old fashioned way. More...
Schools Targeted in Streaming Video Patent Claim
Schools Targeted in Streaming Video Patent Claim
Don't bother reading the full article (you'll see what I mean). Everything you need is in the first paragraph, with the exception of two strategically deleted words: streaming video. More...
An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them
An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them
The purpose of a persona is to create testing scenarios for software. The idea is to take research beyond market segments and to create a whole person out of the 'two and a half children. More...
Why Engage in E-science?
Why Engage in E-science?
This is about right: "there is a revolution going on - the democratisation of science." This article looks at this from the point of view of librarians. The revolution is that one person uses another prson's data. But there is a lot of data, and it's constantly changing. The librarian's challenge is to enable access to this data. More...
Email 'Leak' Suggests SCO Got up to $100m From MS
Email 'Leak' Suggests SCO Got up to $100m From MS
There are reverberations through the open source community today as a website prints what it suggests is a "leaked memo" showing that Microsoft put up $100 million to help SCO pursue its lawsuits and undermine Linux. More...
ICQ Builds a Social Network
ICQ Builds a Social Network
An interesting twist to the social networking software story unfolds today as ICQ launches an a social networking site. Yes, ICQ, the instant messaging program now owned by America Online. More...
What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive
What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive
If you produce content of any type, you need to read Vin Crosbie's (long awaited) advice to the newspaper industry: "For its survival, the newspaper industry must produce and automatically deliver, wired and wirelessly, entirely intact and individually customized editions that are smaller, vertically formatted, and that combine the graphical layout capabilities of print and the interactive multimedia capabilities of the Web, and flow to fit any display screen or printed paper size." There's a lot more in this article, but the essence is clear: personalize or die. More...
CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada
CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada
As Michael Geist summarizes, "the court now appears to be considering all copyright law interpretation through the lens of balancing user rights with creators rights.” This is an important ruling. More...
Standards Matter
Standards Matter
This publication missed me with its first two issues, but the third showed up in Edu_RSS today and I'm glad it did, as it pointed me to things like the new IMS RSS feed, the IEEE standard for runtime services communication (in which I learn that IEEE calls Javascript "ECMAScript" (for no good reason, so far as I can tell), the Australia Research Repositaries Online to the World (ARROW) project, and much, much more. More...
Stop Teaching My Kid
Stop Teaching My Kid
I couldn't pass on this one. The author's contention is that "most parents want an easy pass (in some cases, an easy A) rather than a course in which their children acquire real knowledge and skills." Whether or not this observation is statistically valid, it nonetheless speaks to a misplacement of value, replacing a desire for accomplishment (that is, learning) with a desire for a sign of accomplishment (that is, an A). More...