Play It Cyber Safe
Ferret filled folly foisted on unwary readers by the Business Software Alliance in an effort to convince people that stolen software will freeze cities. More...

The DMCA--Here, There and Everywhere
Good discussion of a link between copyright and world trade. More...

Music Settlement
Transcript of a CNN interview with one of the students sued by the RIAA for sharing music files, Jesse Jordan. You can tell it's going to be one of those kinds of interviews when the interviewer makes a mistake in the first question. More...

Teachers and Scholars and Their Fragile Digital Objects
Discussion of the preservation of New-Model scholarship, mentioned a few days ago in OLDaily. The author points out that the creator has a certain responsibility to posterity. "Yet we all [know] what it's like to stumble across these pages on the Internet, and not really be sure whose they are or where they came from. You can guess it is a document for a class, but it is not clearly labeled; sometimes not even the name of the author is clear, much less the date of the document, its purpose, its intended audience." Well, let's not go overboard. More...

Cultural Globalization Is Not Americanization
We don't hear a lot about world free trade and education. It could be because, as some suggest, "The whole idea of Transnational Ed has a not-so-vaguely colonialist dimension to it. In the context of the WTO and GATS, there will be net exporters and net importers of Higher Education services. It is not difficult to guess which nations will line up on which side of that divide." On the other hand, we have people like the author of this article who argues that world free trade will not have as a result the globalization of American culture. More...

Program Lets P2P Users Roam Free
The only surprise here is that this development - predicted last week in these pages - took so long to emerge. This article describes the development of applications that allow peer-to-peer file traders to disguise their online transactions. This makes it significantly more difficult for people looking at their online access to detect the exchange of material the music industry doesn't like. More...

School Board: Teacher's Personal Web Site is Grounds For Dismissal
Let me see if I understand this. Crude humour and scatological references are broadcast on network televsion on programs such as South Park. But when the same brand of material is placed on a teacher's website, this is grounds for firing? It's not clear that this is the case - administrators allege that there are unnamed "other" grounds. More...

The Big Picture, Wider-Fi, 802.everything, Manhattan WiFi, etc.
Forget the sceptics. Wireless is here to stay - and it won't be what you expect. "There was a long list of reasons ten years ago for why the Web would never turn into something serious -- certainly not into something that could be used for secure business transactions. The same list of shortcomings is being attributed to WiFi today, security, scalability, reliability, business model, etc. Just like the Web, WiFi is grass roots, standards based, and very decentralized. Just like with the Web, there is no stopping WiFi from becoming mainstream." Not what you expect. More...

Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape
Not what you think. This article describes the use of knowledge management approaches for educational administration. In one example, it proposes tracking disciplinary incidents according to student, class, race, time of day, and so on, in order to identify likely causes (in the example, a poorly trained teacher). More...

How the Mind Makes Meaning in E-Learning, Part I
This article has the right idea but should have been subjected to a critical review. Writes the author, "The human mind evolves by arranging perceptions by means of connections. Applied to learning, this means that it is important to understand how the mind makes connections, at different moments in time, and to develop tasks and learning experiences that complement the connection patterns and preferences." So far so good. More...