Notes from Microsoft
David Weinberger is the latest in a series of speakers to travel to Redmond and tell Microsoft what it doesn't want to hear - that current approaches to DRM are a path to failure. More...

Canada and Copyright
Good summary of the recent history, current state and likely future of file sharing under Canadian copyright law. Things are good now in this country, but likely to go downhill fast if pledges to reform copyright law are acted upon. More...

Blogging at MEA
Very nice summary of a panel at the Media Ecology Association (MEA) conference in Rochester featuring featuring Liz Lawley, Alex Halavais, Sébastien Paquet, Clay Shirky, and Jill Walker. More...

Q&A with Saul Carliner
I like Carliner's frank assessment of the current state of e-learning and his sober perspective on the predictions made by various e-learning pundits. In particular worth noting are the low scores given to e-learning on student assessments and the lack of knowledge of decision makers in the field. Carliner also expresses caution regarding the roles games, simulations and blogs will play in e-learning. More...

Swap Blockers Graduate to High Schools
Good overview full of links to primary sources (the way online news coverage should be, unlike the link deserts found on most news web sites) describing the trend of using P2P network blockers in high schools. Well, the micro-trend, anyways, since only a few schools are named. More...

Information and Communications Technologies in Schools Survey
More than 97 percent of Canadian schools have internet access, with the schools averaging one computer for every five students, according to this new study by Industry Canada. The bulk of these computers use "always-on" internet connections (as compared to dial-up, but a nice euphemism that masks whether or not the connections are high-speed). More...

Primer: Event-Driven Architecture
The focus of this article isn't exactly what I'd like, but it does provide a useful heads-up regarding the emerging idea of "event-driven architecture." Basically, the idea is that a computer system responds to changing external events rather than human input. More...

Learning From Disappointment: When Learning Solutions Fail to Deliver
A lot of e-learning disappoints, and it makes sense, as the author suggests, to learn from our mistakes (that's why I've learned so much). But to learn from a mistake, you have to correctly identify the cause of the problem. Is this list it? I'm not so sure. More...

NMC 2004 Summer Conference
The NMC 2004 Summer Conference has started and the Edu_RSS aggregator page is kicking into high gear. More...

Whither the Semantic Web
The future isn't enterprise systems, proprietary databases, web services, Java runtime engines, or standardized ontologies. That's not what the web was, that's not what RSS is, and that's not the future of online semantics. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, June 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...