OUP supports Oxford University Library Services "Open Archives" Initiative
The Oxford University Press has more to lose than most by posting its articles for free online. Nonetheless, it has decided to post OUP articles by Oxford University professors for free online access. More...

States Put The Brakes On Prepaid Tuition Plans
You may recall my somewhat less than warm reception to pre-paid tuition plans several weeks ago. It turns out that I was not the only one to have misgivings and several states have now called a halt to the program before it turns into a nightmare. More...

Benefactor withdraws $200 million for charters
Why, one might ask, would there be "legislative bickering" over a proposal to spend $200 million building 15 charter schools? Well, let's look at this the other way: why didn't philanthropist Bob Thompson donate $200 million to the Detroit area school boards to spend where it was most needed? It's one thing to be generous; it's quite another to use your wealth to circumvent the normal process of having voters decide priorities and having experts identify solutions. More...

The BBC - Educational Resources
In a natural follow-up to last week's look at the educational resources offered by Australia Broadcasting, Web Tools looks today at the British Broadcasting Corporation's generous array of offerings. The BBC has had to cross a number of hurdles en route to providing free online learning content, and these are documented here. More...

Professor Warcraft
Games are better educators than you think, argues the author, and the evidence for this is the deep knowledge gamers have of fictional worlds. "The fact that they generally teach us about fictional worlds or nonacademic issues is secondary to the fact that history, literature, geography, art, and pretty much anything else can be taught effectively in a game environment." The author contrasts current trends in e-learning - "affordable, disposable learning modules so easy and cheap to create that it's better to produce new courses than update old ones" - and suggests that games could adapt to this world. In the gaming community, the equivalent of a learning object is a 'mod' - a player-authored replacement for an original part of the game. More...

Guidance on Teaching the Gifted and Talented
When I was in grade 9 or 10, our teachers herded a group of us into a room and announced their intent to form what they called the Alpha Club for the school's gifted or advanced students. In retrospect, that wasn't the best name, and in any event, nothing ever followed the initial meeting. More...

How DRM-Based Content Delivery Systems Disrupt Expectations of 'Personal Use'
The 'personal uses' identified in this paper include portability (the ability to use content on multiple devices), excerpting, and "limited relation and interaction with copyright holders." This last is probably the most significant: when you buy a coffee, you don't show identification, you don't sign a contract, and the relationship ends with the transaction. More...

When Blogs Get Really Popular
While I have been saying that the blog phenomenon, this article - and the majority view - suggests that it will become even greater. But if you look more closely at the article, what you see is that blogging's growth may be fuelled more by a redefinition of the term than by any actual increase. More...

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
Released today, the declaration defines open access (as, essentially, "free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work," and placement of the work in an open repository), and expresses its support for open access. More...

Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks
It goes without saying, but in an online environment classes and classrooms are artificial constructs, relics of an age when physical and resource limitations required the clumping of students into discrete spaces. More...