Colleges Push Professors into Media Spotlight
You may have read in one of the many articles depicting the future of online learning the prediction that individual professors would become media stars. According to this report, this trend is beginning to emerge, with some professors fielding dozens of media interviews a week. More...

The Dynamic Approach to Learning
There isn't a whole lot that's revolutionary in this interview with Jonathon Levy, but his assessment of the field is consistent with mine: "The field is marked by a juxtaposition of new technology and old pedagogy." Consistent with his previous work, Levy proposes a dymanic workplace model of learning. More...

User Registration Need Not Be Inevitable
I have long complained about user registration in news sites - readers may have notice that (with the New York Times excepted) I do not link from OLDaily to sites that require user registration. More...

Colleges Reach out Via Instant Messaging
This would be a good starting point for a case study were somebody doing more in depth work in the use of instant messaging in e-learning (this article is itself pretty superficial). It describes how Boston University's admission counselors use instant messaging to field questions from prospective students about admissions procedures, college life or the status of their application. More...

Requirements for a CLO
To short for an article, too long for an OLDaily item, but worth keeping around - the Learning Circuit blog is a perfect place for things like these (and I need to keep remembering than I have access to it). Anyhow, I was asked today to list the attributes a CLO would need to have and to demonstrate to a hiring committee... here's what I came up with. By Stephen Downes, Learning Circuits Blog, June 25, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

The Educational Semantic Web
The discussion areas for this online book, The Educational Semantic Web, are now online. More...

Welcome to TextChoice
This is pretty interesting. The announcement of this Thomson product, TextChoice2, carried in University Business, notes that it "features a digital database of content that teachers and professors can use to create customized materials." The interface is unfortunately quite slow and it's not really user-friendly, but if you dig a bit what you'll find is that they divided up their texts into 10 or 12 page chunks, which you can select and arrange into your own 'custom text'. More...

IP Telephony Cookbook
Now online, "the IP Telephony Cookbook was developed as the final deliverable of the TERENA IP Telephony project as a reference document for setting up IP Telephony solutions at university campuses and NRENs." Most people aren't going to want to read this document, but it is required reading for system administrators (so forward this link their way). More...

Encouraging Interaction in Online Classes
The new issue of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning is out. I feature two articles, beginning with this survey article by issue editor Brent Muirhead. More...

Mixing Morals With Education?
The take on this news article is that colleges and universities ought to be teaching students morality, and that institutions are somehow lacking when they say things like, "ollectively we are silent on the issue of morality." Of course there is a big difference - glossed over in the discussion - between teaching students about morality in general and teaching them to adhere to a specific set of morals. More...