Secret Standards Business?
Some great links from last week's EDUCAUSE Australia, thanks to the good people from The Networker. More tomorrow. In this first item: many have thought this, but few have come right out and said it. The standards building process sometimes resembles a secret society, with its own (canonical) vocabularity, meetings in exotic places, and a special handshake. More...

From Thinkers to Clickers: The World Wide Web and the Transformation of the Essence of Being Human
This article tries to argue that our inclination to click our way through the world wide web has become a substitute for thinking. Oh for the days of the book, pines the author, when the delay of several hours or days before the next one arrives would give us time to think about, and perhaps even understand, the last one. More...

Canada's Advanced Technology Business Plan
Not actually a plan, this document is a set of recommendations forwarded by the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) based on a survey of city executives and business leaders across Canada. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of major Canadian cities with respect to innovation in technology and offers suggestions based on that assessment. More...

Is Palladium Getting a Bad Rap?
Microsoft is playing the coy innocent in its reaction to the criticism it has suffered since announced its 'trusted computing' (or as Richard Stallman styles it, 'treacherous computing') platform. In this article, MS developer Mario Juarez responds, "There's this mythology surrounding NGSCB that Microsoft is in league with the media industry to override consumers' rights. That makes no sense. More...

The Web's Impact On Student Learning
The author might be the first to agree that this survey of research in web-based learning is a bit misleading, since, as she notes, there has been little effort made to distinguish between the impact of the new technology and the impact of the learning design delivered, or employed, using that technology. No matter. More...

TidBITS Policy on Challenge-Response
If you're thinking of using a challenge-response (C-R) system to block spam, think again. The idea of C-R is that if an email comes from an unrecognized source, the email is blocked until the sender, in response to an email (the 'challenge') goes to a website and answers a question only humans can answer (the 'response'). More...

NationStates
Not sure how it will go but I really like the concept, so I created the nation of Merlandia in the game of NationStates, a straight-forward world politics simulation. One thing I like about this is the pacing: you are presented with one issue a day. More...

No One Standard Will Suit All
It began as a lonely voice in the wilderness but has grown into open revolt as delegate after delegate at the E-Learning Results conference comes forward with the same message: "there is no one standard to rule them all, nor will there ever be. However seductive the vision of universal interoperability may be, each and every community has its own needs and wants that need to be addressed." IMS, it would appear, now hears this. More...

What Makes a Publisher Important?
I like the direction this article heads, but I'm not so sure publishers will, if they follow its implications to their logical conclusion. The article proposes, in brief, that an article may be measured for importance by "the relative number of citations of a search engine as the evaluation criteria." By implication, a journal that accumulates a greater aggregate score is probably better than one with fewer links. More...

RSS Profile Wiki
The development of RSS has been a chaotic process. The specification has split, or "forked," several times. The community as a whole is divided over whther RDF should form the basis. It is in this environment that Mark Nottingham has decided to stimulate discussion by setting up this RSS Profile Wiki in an effort to see whether the community can settle on a single profile. More...