Content Management: Our Organized Future
According to the author, "Content management is the management of content (any digital item - video, audio, text, graphic, links to physical resources, etc.) to allow for contribution from varied sources with points of control to ensure quality." And in education, "digital content creation is far outpacing management." I don't completely agree: there's a lot of both content creation and content management; unfortunately they are separate systems with separate sets of objectives. More...

Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Handy timeline with links to the important and authoritative works in artificial intelligence, including expert systems and neural nets. More...

Standardization and Its Unseen Ironies
Littered with great quotes and zingers, this article asks, "Who in their right educational mind would want to create a 21st-century system of learning based on the mismeasurement of young children?" The author then launches a sustained attack on the usefuless and reasonableness of standardized testing as a politically motivated ploy against public education and in favour of privatized, standards based learning. More...

SBC Enforcing All-Encompassing Web Patent
A company called SBC Communications Inc is reported to be enforcing patent it owns on the use of frames in web pages. In a letter distributed to web site owners, the company notes the site's use of "selectors or tabs that correspond to specific locations (which) are not lost when a different part of the document is displayed to the user." It then demands between $527 and $16.6m per year to license the patented technology. More...

Business Etiquette Catching Up To A Wireless World
I think that the lesson here is, if you can't multitask, don't bring your laptop into your class or your meeting. Nobody expects you to spend a solid two hours in rapt attention to the speaker (that never happened before wireless either). But you are expected to be following the speakrs when they are speaking. More...

Where Next for RSS?
Not exactly in-depth, this article nonetheless highlights some major (and not so major) issues facing the content syndication community: machine-specific aggregators, the choice of reading software, the traffic problem, the media-type problem and the business model problem. More...

Googlert

This service uses Google to keep track of what the web is saying about you (or your product, or your pet cat). It took me about five minutes to sign up and then the daily emails started coming. More...

Removing the Barriers to Research: An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians
As the title suggests, this article is an introduction to open access repositories. After introducing the pricing crisis in scholarly publications, Suber outlines what he calls the permission crisis: the maze of rules, regulations and licensing conditions that must be satisfied under current copyright regimes. More...

Consumer Electronics & Learning/Training
You won't like this link if you don't have broadband, but if you do have broadband then this video by Elliott Masie covering the Consumer Electronic Show is good viewing. The picture quality is very good, and while there are some sound level issues the audio is clear enough to be engaging. More...

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
Anyone designing e-learning should be familiar with the elements of visual design. This article provides an unfortunately terse outline of some of the major concepts. But I like the approach: using design to tell a story visually. More...