CanCore Update
I have about an hour to go before the hockey game, and there is no good reason to exclude any of this from today's newsletter, so I am just going to forward Nom's email en masse. I'll read this stuff on the plane tomorrow; you can get a jump on me and read it tonight. More...

The Evolving Concept of the Community of Practice
PowerPoint slides from my presentation at the Building Distributed Communities of Practice conference in Saskatoon. Also, the Audacity audio recording software worked perfectly - you will need to download LAME to encode MP3s (just put it in a directory; no install required). More...

Reuters RSS
I mentioned a while ago that Reuters withdrew content from Yahoo! in order to become a stand-alone news service. The next step in this happened today as it launched a set of RSS feeds covering general news and specific areas, such as business and health. More...

Adapt or Die: The Strategic Role of Learning in the On-Demand Enterprise
The message of the article is essentially that "the current market economy places a premium on innovation, new business models and new ways of organizing work." It's not the first time we've seen the phrase "adapt or die" in an article - such as this item by Don Tapscott a few days ago - and thus far the choice hasn't been that stark, not even for music or news companies. More...

Canada Is Still No. 1 In E-Government Ranking
Canada is number one in e-government for the fourth straight year, according to this survey from Accenture. Being inside that government I am able to see some of the planning and discussions around e-government, and what I've seen suggests to me that we'll be in this position for years to come. More...

Why Use DRM If It Doesn't Work?
OK, I've felt like a pretty lonely voice with this argument, but somebody agrees with me: DRM isn't about the money, "it's all about the control." That's why, according to this author, DRM works for companies even if it doesn't succeed it protecting content - it provides the legimacy and support for a network in which content producers maintain legal control over the use of the material produced. More...

The Art of Blogging
George Siemens talks about blogging at the MADLat Conference, linking to this summary of his talk as well as to his notes on my talk from earlier in the day - nice. More...

Projecting Quality
I am at the Manitoba Association for Distributed Learning and Training (MADLaT) Conference here in Winnipeg where I was able to catch up with my friends from the province. It's too bad this conference is so short - it would have been nice to spend more time with them. More...

Record Labels Must Pay Shortchanged Performers
You know, it's pretty hard to take the music industry seriously when it complains about piracy after things like today's story. After years of investigation, the industry agreed to pay $50 million worth of royalties it had simply not paid artists. More...

Free for Education Home Page
AEShareNet has launched a license called Free for Education. In essence, "The Free for Education mark indicates that material may be freely used for educational purposes. The mark may be applied by anyone to any material in which they own the copyright provided they agree with the conditions set out in these pages." Those of you who follow this stuff are aware that I have had a running dispute with Create Commons about exactly the same issue, as a Creative Commons 'education' license was being proposed. More...