Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT...
The point of this short item is to complain about two things: first, that MIT's OpenCourseWare was developed using Microsoft products, and second, that much of the back-end work was done in India. I can't get over the logic of the first - "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering." Sheesh. More...

Living Democratically in the Learning Environment
I have long maintained that freedom is about more than just rights, and that democracy is about more than just elections. If you cannot live freely, for whatever reason, then you are not free, no matter what the constitution may say. More...

ITU Digital Access Index: World’s First Global ICT Ranking
I'm sure it's not the "world's first" (the text explains why they think other rankings were not "global") but the results are nonetheless interesting as the survey combines the availability and affordability of communications technologies with an educational index. More...

There's a Noose in the Hoose - iTunes Shoppers Discover DRM
Worth reiterating: the battle over digital rights management is not about getting people to pay for resources, it's about control over the distribution of resources. More...

The Spoke
Microsoft has very quietly launched a new blogging service, The Spoke, which is, as InfoWorld describes it, " targeted at tech-savvy people in their teens and 20s." According to the article, it's "part of Microsoft's Academic Developer initiative." Interesting. Anyhow, I created my own blog on the service, Downes Contra Microsoft, and began subversive operations immediately, calling for categories on 'Perl' and 'Open Source'. More...