How to Send Email

One of the many reasons for writing your own software is that you discover how to do simple tasks that would otherwise require complicated, sometimes expensive, and usually restrictive software. Sending email is a case in point. More...

GooFresh

This is pretty cool. It is an interface to Google that supports date based searching. This means that you can access results that have been added in, say, the last day or the last week. More...

Evaluation of Citebase
Interesting exercise designed to introduce readers to a Web search service, Citebase, that allows them to find research papers and to display results by selecting different ranking criteria, such as how many times the paper or the author has been cited or browsed. The aim of the exercise is to test how usable and useful readers find this service. More...

Do Libraries Really Need Books?
Any doubt about the tone of this article is removed in the subtitle: "Controversial projects at some colleges move the printed word out of sight." This is, of course, a ridiculous way to describe the use of electronic texts instead of dead tree products. The article describes, as the title implies, the growing reliance of college libraries on electronic texts - largely at their students' urging. More...

Thomson and HIPAA Academy Launch HIPAA Certification and Learning Solutions to Healthcare Industry
Just a press release, this item is nonetheless an example of an emerging trend, non-standard certification. This time the certification authority is a publishing company, the Thomson Corporation, working in concert with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Authority. More...

Moodle
From the website: "Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites (including this one). Moodle is an ongoing research and development project designed to support a social constructionist pedagogy. Moodle is given away freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License). More...

Promising Chapter in E-Book Story
Here's a rare article, one predicting a positive future for ebooks. Keep in mind that the source is Wired News, an agency with a demonstrable preference for the format. That said, the author digs up some encouraging statistics from eBookWeb, a web site specializing in ebooks: 500,000 page views per month and improved ebooks sales by a number of vendors, including McGraw-Hill with an increase of 55 percent over this time last year. More...

European Administrations Should Share Software Resources
A report released by Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA), part of the European Commission, argues that administrators should share software. This nothing other than anathema to most commercial software companies, since they prefer that each individual user pruchase a separate licenses. More...

Showing Up... And Other Dumb School Rules
I personally do not think that the measurement of days attended is really a good indication of educational performance. I say that having achieved, in my fourth year of university, a personal best year - I attended fully two thirds of all my classes. More...

The Ugly Lie About Vouchers
I think that this is an important point to make. The promise of vouchers is that they enable parents to make choices about their children's education. But many parents, particularly those of low income and a poor educational background, fail to make any choice at all (much less a good choice). More...