National Sciences Digital Library

Now we're getting somewhere. The first release of the National Sciences Distributed Library (NSDL) is now available, offering a search and browse through a variety of science related research libraries. More...

From the Capital to the Classroom: State and Federal Efforts to Implement the No Child Left Behind Act
Educators in the United States will find this assessment of the "No Child Left Behind Act" interesting in its own right - it states that while the states are generally supportive of the objectives of the act, they may balk if the provisions are enforced too rigidly and if financial support is not there. More...

Robotics Replaces Industrial Arts in Shop Classes of Today
When I was in school the closest we came to anything industrial was the creation of abstract metal sculptures and drilling a hole through the wall with an oxy-acetylene torch. It's a bit different in classrooms today as "shop" has been replaced with a much wider - and useful - curriculum. More...

You've Got Gym: School Offers PE Classes Online

Online gym. Yes, it can be done - putting to flight yet another long-held myth about online learning. It's not all reading and filling in forms, thankfully. More...

ADL Takes First Step to Repository Profile
Interesting. As Wilbert Kraan summarizes it, "With the publication of a report on 'Emerging and Enabling Technologies for the Design of Learning Object Repositories', ADL is taking the first tentative steps to designing a learning object repository application profile to complement its existing learning object reference model, SCORM." As I have discovered in my own work (and as OAI discovered in theirs), you can't just rely on learning object jetadata to make the contents of a metadata repository accessible. More...

The Blogging Phenomenon: An Overview and Theoretical Consideration
A nice paper outlining the history of blogging and clearly sketching the movement's defining features. The second part of the paper, though, is a lot more original as the author surveys several theories of mass communication as they relate to weblogs: agenda setting, multi-step flow theories, gate keeping and the spiral of silence. More...

Renmin Voice
I am a strong supporter of the semantic web and so it was with some concern that I read Mark Pilgrim - someone who's writing I admire - speak out against the concept over the holidays. There's a link to his argument in this article, and also a reply offered by the author, a reply that is not so much a point by point rebuttal but rather a "testament to the virtues of Semantic Web." What we need to be careful about when we talk about metadata, RDF, and all that stuff is to avoid the trap of believing that there will be one set of mketadata tags, one vocabulary, one ontology, for all of us to use. It doesn't work that way. More...

Copyright, Ethics and Theft
The relation between copyright and ethics is not nearly so clear as supposed. While it is easy to piously pronounce that people who copy online content are unethical and even evil, it is also wrong. More...

School Launches Herculean Hot Spot
Nice to have glimpses into the future, this one from the Netherlands as the University of Twente has launched a huge "hot spot" (area of wireless internet connectivity). "Students and staff are quick adopters of these nice facilities. The flexible way of teaching that this allows also helps with new students who have experienced new ways of (learning) at school. They're not used to classical ways of knowledge transfer anymore." Meanwhile, the press is reporting a wave of wireless venture startups. More...

IMRC - Metadata Training
The Canadian Treasury Board Secretariat has released an updated package of materials to assist people conducting staff training in metadata. More...