UK Schools' Websites
Somebody saw an awful lot of school websites in the last few months as all 3644 school websites in Britain have been visited, catalogued, and listed in this new version of the database. More...

SCO: GPL Threatens $229B Software Market
I may not like them - they are, after all, undermining open source software. But they sure make the issues clear, even if their depiction of the other side reads like a caricature. More...

Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002
Though this document appears to report the blindingly obvious (the head in TechLearning News was "School Internet Use Soars") it is nonetheless a treasure trove of information about scholl access as of 2002, including information on availability, laptop acdess, use of filtering software, and much more. More...

Solveig Singleton on Open Source, Games, and Public Policy
Given that games are widely touted as the guture for online learning (especially by me) the implications of this article are interesting. The central thesis of the item is that there are few open source games, and the author seeks to explain why. More...

New Feature: Reviews
Those of you who have read my Resource Profiles paper will have noticed the bit where I talk about evaluative metadata. This is an announcement of the implimentation of such a feature in Blogware: "Blogware is one of the first (if not *the* first) blogging tools to support Reviews and Review metadata. Reviews are essentially article entries with a twist. Sitting at the core of this feature is support for the RVW module for RSS 2.0, an extension to the RSS specification that '...allows machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources.'" The article also links to last May's Review (RVW) Module for RSS 2.0. More...

'Dodgy-dossier Syndrome' Rife in the Workplace
I'm of two minds when it comes to citing sources. On the one hand, I think it's often useless - I once saw an academic paper provide a reference for the observation that the internet is growing. And it's often overdone, more akin to name-dropping than serious discourse. On the other hand, as this article emphasizes, it's important to track sources for important information or examples, so that otjer people can judge the original for themselves and avoid what in this article is 'dodgy research'. More...

Privacilla Criticizes Anti-Commercial Screed Against RFID Tags
Don't they realize, that when you start attacking critics of a technology as 'scare-mongers' that most people (including me) conclude that maybe there is something to worry about. More...

Copyright: What Makes a Use "Fair"?
Short but quality discussion of the concept of "fair use" as it has developed under law and jurisprudence in the U.S. keying on the four major characters: whether the use was commercial or not, whether the work was fact-based or fanciful, how much of the original work was used, and whether there a significant change to the original. More...

The Muscles, Aches, and Pains of Open Source
People often talk about the dangers of depending on open source. This article begins by describing the risks a university takes with commercial software - "We are watching our providers fail, merge, and be acquired... Microsoft challenges us in other ways. We struggle with its licensing offerings. We struggle with the security of its applications." Fair enough. More...

EDUCAUSE Review
Congratulations to the EDUCAUSE Review for coming out with an HTML version alongside the usual PDF! As I am in a hotel room in Dartmouth (Nova Scotia) today, the fast load was really appreciated. More...