eduSource Industry Forum
Presentations from this forum held late March - in the form of PowerPoint slides - are now available on the eduSource website. More...

Study Finds Charter Schools Lack Experienced Teachers
A California study of charter schools in that state finds that the alternative schools lack resources and qualified teachers, raising fears that they may increase, rather than reduce, inequalities. More...

RELOAD Releases Beta of Open Source Metadata Editor
OK, we (the learning object community) really needed this: an open source XML authoring tool that reads schema (XSD) files to allow the creation of both simle and complex metadata files. More...

Wine Agent 1.0
So what's the perfect beverage for a pasta dish with a spicy red sauce? I would say the same as for any other dish: beer. This site disagrees, recommending a spunky little Pinot Noir from Mount Eden. More...

XP, Windows Server to Support AMD's Opteron
Yesterday I suggested that we ought to be watching for the next round of upgrades as 64-bit processing began to be widely deployed. It may hit sooner than we think. Microsoft said yesterday it will be supporting 64-bit technology with its new versions of Windows XP and Server 2003. More...

Enterprise Software Redux: An Open Letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes
Kevin Kruse writes an open letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes in response to the latter's contention that enterprise software providers (such as, say, SAP or PeopleSoft) will not make major inroads into the learning management system market. More...

Historical Event Markup and Linking Project
Something like this is much closer to what online learning will eventually look like than all those nice prepackaged lessons. The Historical Event Markup and Linking Project consists of a set of XML files describing historical events connected to an outpuit engine that allows these to be viewed as timelines, maps, or tables of events sorted by date or location. More...

Creating a Controlled Vocabulary
A controlled vocabulary is a set of terms that may be presented to a user when they are making a selection. In the example provided by this article, the vocabulary describes items for sale by two outdoor equipment stores. But of course controlled vocabularies will be of use wherever you need a systematic approach to categorization. More...

Media-S
Several people have sent me this item over the last week or so. From the website, "Media-S is an open-source development project that aims to create an open Digital Rights interface for the creation, playback, and management of multimedia files. Because of its open nature, Ogg Vorbis will be the first format to be protected by this initiative." (Ogg Vorbis is an open source audio format.) I haven't reviewed the spec in detail, so I can't comment intelligently at the moment. More...

Open-Access Best Sellers
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/01
I don't keep close track of how often my eBooks have been downloaded, but I do know it's in the tens of thousands. Maybe more; who knows? But this number, whatever it is, is a compelling argument for offering them for free, as compared to the press run of 300 copies the typical monograph might warrant. More...