Losing Sight of the Content in a Content Management System
Useful short article on maintaining the focus on content in a content management system. Some important principles:

• The simplest and quickest way to find out what your staff need - ask them
• Give the users less, but better, information
• Use professional technical writers and editors
• A permanent process must be put in place to ensure the continued accuracy and coverage of your content. More...

Free Curricula License
A draft version of the proposed Free Curricula License (FCL) has been released and comments are invited. The FCL would be used by educational content providers to ensure that their works remain "open," in the sense that it can be modified, and "free," in the sense of freedom. More...

Introduction to FLE2 Pedagogy
I mentioned FLE3, the Finnish open source learning management system, on this list a few weeks ago. With this item I'd like to draw your attention to FLE2's pedagogical model, one that is centered by a distributed network of expertise. FLE2 is based on a problem solving approach, but I don't see why the approach could not be more widely applicable as an instance of whyat I am now calling 'network learning'. More...

Devices Lend a Learning Hand
Naturally people are sceptical, but I think this initiative that gives kindergarten students the opportunity to use Palm Pilots in their studies is a good one. For one thing, it's a lot cheaper than buying them computers. They can use them outdoors. It gets them ready for when they're older and Palms (or their equivalent) will be in everyday use. More...

Best Practice in Community Building and Information Discovery
I had a dream last night that the managers of the Global E-Learning Summit website had read my email and fixed their x-small font. No such luck. And it's gretting pretty bad when I have dreams about my newsletter. Anyhow. More...

Building Online Communities for Professional Networks
Good paper with a useful set of metrics for evaluating the "health" of an online knowledge community. I don't completely agree with all of the indices, though: for example, I do not see a deeper thread as evidence of a deeper discussion - it often simply reflects a back-and-forth exchange between a minor sub-group. More...

Communities of Practice - The QUT Approach to Online Teaching
Outline of work done at the Queensland University of Technology in the field of communities of practice. The authors identify three major themes in the literature: the relation between communities and teams, the resulting need to change academic work practices, and the need to support, harness and integrate the learning. This is a very organization-centric approach to communities of practice, one that I don't necessarily endorse. It isn't about an organization "harnessing" the learning network: quite the opposite - it's about letting go. More...

Harvard Scientists' Efforts for Free Online Journal Access Make Little Ground
The thrust of this article is that an open access academic journal poject promoted by three Harvard scientists has "stagnated" and that the free online journal has not yet reached the status of, say, Nature or Cell. While well established researchers can take the risk of publishing in a relatively unknown online journal, academics seeking tenure or ambitious gradutae students face the need to publish in an established journal. More...

Making the Case for Content
Good article discussing features that may be considered "characteristic" of an LCMS system: content creation or 'authoring', dynamic delivery, and some administrative capability. What gets me is this little item from Brandon Hall: "if you assume a five-year implementation for 8,000 learners, five servers, and 40 authors, then the average price tag was $537,000 (about $65,000 more than for an LMS). The median price was $430,000, the lowest $150,000 and the highest $1.9 million." This is, to put it bluntly, too much. More...

The Real Experience
This article's best line is its last: "In 1939 the New York Times said of TV 'the trouble with TV is that the average family will never find time for it'." That said, this engaging article looks at some important trends in e-learning with an eye to helping people understand and use the new technologies. More...