SURA Optical Networking Cookbook
From the website: "The SURA Optical Networking Cookbook is a practical resource that details the ingredients required for optical networking and offers "recipes" in the form of case studies that illustrate a variety of optical networking implementations. More...

OpenEAI Educational Middleware Launch Imminent
This open source project will define an XML based message format and protocol with standardised APIs in Java for enterprise integration. More...

Charter Schools Build on a Decade of Experimentation
In a nutshell: "The real truth, say some observers, is that as yet there are no absolute truths about the charter-school movement." But "the changes they'll make to public education in the long run may be far more dramatic than can yet be imagined." Diversity, as John Stuart Mill pointed out a century ago, breeds innovation. More...

Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry
There are some people out there (I won't name names; they know who they are) who think that what people want in things like learning object repositories, digital rights management and other content exchanges are services. Such people should read this column, which describes how Feberal Express laboured under a similar delusion when it launched its ill-fated centralized fax service, ZapMail. More...

The Envelope, Please: WebCT Opens Nominations for e-Learning's 'Oscars(R)'

What are the chances that a course designed in Blackboard will win an award offered and judged by WebCT staff or appointees? Yeah, that's about what I thought. More...

Elsevier's Vanishing Act
Who made Elsevier the arbiter of history and law? That's what appears to be happening as the publisher is quietly removing articles from its database: no notice, no explanation, no appeal. It used to be, if Elsevier found an article plagiarized a previous source, say, a noticewould be published and, if you didn't believe them, you could check for yourself. No more. More...

Hackers Take on MS on Copyright Protection for eBooks
A British programmer is walking on dangerous grounds having posted on his website the source code to a program that cracks the highest level of Microsoft's eBook DRM scheme. His objective, however, is benign: he would like to be able to read eBooks he has leagally purchased on his older Win CE device. More...

Columbia's Internet Concern Will Soon Go Out of Business

Fathom.com, the commercial company created by Columbia University to provide courses and other material over the Internet, will be folded in April. More...

Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, with Prentice Hall PTR Publishers

The people at Slashdot are all over this, of course, as Prentice Hall will publish a series of books under an open source license. More...

Making Copyright Ambidextrous: An Expose of Copyleft
An interesting discussion of open source licensing which argues that the success of the movement is based on the possibility of using legal sanctions to enforce its terms. More...