Reed Elsevier Gives in on Free Research
Fallout continues from Elsevier's agreement to allow authors to publish their articles own on their own web sites (how odd that sounds!) including this article describing it as "a major concession to the 'open access' lobby." Not that there is such a thing as "the open access lobby" per se. More...

No Network Effect
Rafe Needleman tap into a long-standing concern of mine, networks that don't interoperate. Examples abound: instant messaging, social networks, push-to-talk, VoIP. While customers benefit from network effects, he writes, companies simply see it as lost revenue. More...

Microsoft's Patent Plans Worry Open-Source Supporters
Microsoft's plans to leverage a badly flawed U.S. patent system to begin crushing open source by licensing and litigation has advocates worried. More...

RSS: Grassroots Support Leads to Mass Appeal
Learning Circuits has run my article on RSS, surveying some of the details of the syndication format and discussing the relation between RSS and some other initiatives such as OAI and social networking. More...

McDonald's, Sony to serve downloads with Big Macs
Would you like fries with that learning object? OK, maybe not yet, but when free digital content is being given away with McDonald's hamburgers, you can tell from that just how disposable digital content really is. More...

Allies Land in France
This is what a news organization can do if it decides to embrace the web - CBC's retrospective of the 1944 D-Day invasion isn't just cracking good news coverage, it's also great educational material. More...

RSS Feeds Can Build Web Traffic, but Fence Sitters Note Problems
The first thing you'll learn from this article is the meaning of the term 'scraping', something I think a number of academic publications are ripe for. Scraping illustrates the power of RSS: "yanking control" over information viewing from the providers and placing it into the hands of the readers. More...

TOIA - A First Look
The author takes a spin though the TOIA - Technologies for Online Interoperable Assessment system - and offers this review. Some usability issues, a quirky Java engine that would stymie someone like me (turn it off? I didn't even know it was on!) and a smallish question bank. More...

NMC 2004 - Who Runs the Show?
Some heat is being generated around the 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' project at NMC 2004. I can offer clarifications for my bit: all feeds harvested by Edu_RSS are used to generate the NMC 2004 coverage are listed here. Martin Terre Blanche makes this observation: "The 'don't ask me - it's somebody else's responsibility' syndrome is typical of large, centralised bureaucracies and Alan's response (in his persona as centralist faction coordinator) is therefore to be expected. However, I have to admit that it may also be a symptom of decentralisation - of small pieces loosely joined. For a user of systems made up of loosely coupled pieces it can be quite frustrating to figure out who is in charge of what." But you need to understand - my NMC continuing coverage is not part of Alan's presentation. It is a separate and parallel initiative that collaborates with his presentation. More...

Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow
A victim of its own success, writes this author, a former employee, Microsoft depends on its Windows operating system for revenue - a system that is full of usability, stability and security flaws and won't be updated again for years. More...