Organizational Development Portal

Just launched, the Organizational Development Portal looks at issues related to human resources and staff development from a wider perspective. More...

Dan Rehak: "SCORM is not for everyone"
There is a fascinating report about SCORM in today's CETIS. Though very short, it contains some items - tinderboxes, actually - that should give developers serious pause for thought. For example, though version 1.3 of SCORM is in draft and version 1.4 is coming down the pipe, SCORM 2.0, expected in 2004, will be "a complete rewrite of SCORM, and focus on task simulations and be highly adaptive. It will therefore have a new content model and new performance support." This means that all your nice new SCORM 1.x compliant applications and resources (on which you may have spent millions of dollars) will be obsolete some time in 2004. More...

SCORM Best Practices Guide for Content Developers
The new SCORM best practices guide is out. But before rushing to the developer's chair, read the next item first. More...

Content at Your Fingertips: Better Ways to Classify & Tag
This item, dredged from the ether by elearningpost, is a fascinating look at some of the complexities of metatagging. Everybody agrees that metatags will be most useful, helping narrow searches to clearly defined categories of content. But nobody wants to tag 10,000 resources by hand. More...

Apple Stands Firm Against Entertainment Cartel
I passed over this article about three times today before the implications sunk in (sometimes I'm just slow). Apple Computers - noted for its "Rip, Mix, Burn" advertising campaign a while back - has found a market niche (perhaps) in refusing to build digital use controls (aka digital rights management) into its computers. More...

Digital Promises
Discussion of Hubert Dreyfus's article "As Educators Rush to Embrace, a Coterie of Skeptics Seeks to Be Heard." A cyber-sceptic, Dreyfus argues that "The risk-free anonymity of the Internet, he says, makes it a good medium for slander, innuendo, endless gossip, and ultimately, boredom. Without some way of telling the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring." I think this can be answered by pointing out that life online is as real in any meaningful sense as life offline. More...