Email 'Leak' Suggests SCO Got up to $100m From MS
There are reverberations through the open source community today as a website prints what it suggests is a "leaked memo" showing that Microsoft put up $100 million to help SCO pursue its lawsuits and undermine Linux. More...

ICQ Builds a Social Network
An interesting twist to the social networking software story unfolds today as ICQ launches an a social networking site. Yes, ICQ, the instant messaging program now owned by America Online. More...

What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive
If you produce content of any type, you need to read Vin Crosbie's (long awaited) advice to the newspaper industry: "For its survival, the newspaper industry must produce and automatically deliver, wired and wirelessly, entirely intact and individually customized editions that are smaller, vertically formatted, and that combine the graphical layout capabilities of print and the interactive multimedia capabilities of the Web, and flow to fit any display screen or printed paper size." There's a lot more in this article, but the essence is clear: personalize or die. More...

CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada
As Michael Geist summarizes, "the court now appears to be considering all copyright law interpretation through the lens of balancing user rights with creators rights.” This is an important ruling. More...

Standards Matter
This publication missed me with its first two issues, but the third showed up in Edu_RSS today and I'm glad it did, as it pointed me to things like the new IMS RSS feed, the IEEE standard for runtime services communication (in which I learn that IEEE calls Javascript "ECMAScript" (for no good reason, so far as I can tell), the Australia Research Repositaries Online to the World (ARROW) project, and much, much more. More...

Stop Teaching My Kid
I couldn't pass on this one. The author's contention is that "most parents want an easy pass (in some cases, an easy A) rather than a course in which their children acquire real knowledge and skills." Whether or not this observation is statistically valid, it nonetheless speaks to a misplacement of value, replacing a desire for accomplishment (that is, learning) with a desire for a sign of accomplishment (that is, an A). More...

JISC Programme to Foster The Pick 'n Mix MLE
Nice description of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): "Rather than have a calendar or scheduling function in every computer system that needs it, you have just the one calendaring component that exposes its service to anything or anyone who wants it." One major advantage of this approach is that "small and simple home-spun tools that make a real difference in teaching and learning can piggy-back on the functionality of bigger systems." The trick, of course, is to make this work. More...

Flagship UKeU E-learning Project Faces Major Restructuring
CETIS notes, "Following disappointing student numbers and serious difficulty in raising private finance, the UK e-Universities has been asked by government funders to come up with a restructuring plan before April. The emphasis should shift from commercial provision of courses to supporting e-learning development in the state universities." Predicting that the commercial courses model wasn't going to work would have been easy. More...

The Cockroach of Repository Interoperability: Simple Query Interface
CETIS never fails to amuse with its titles. It also never fails to enlighten with its crisp, clear writing. This article is no exception to either rule as it describes yet another learning object standard, the proposed Simple Query Interface being developed by CEN/ISSS. Unlike some other recent initiatives, this one is visibly drawing from the work of previous projects, including Ariadne, CELEBRATE, Edutella, Elena, EduSource, ProLearn, Universal/EducaNext and Zing (now there's some pedigree, eh?). More...

Fostering Interoperability, Japanese Style
CETIS is on a roll this week, and so I present four in a roll from the British educational standards agency. This first item looks at e-learning standards development in Japan via an interview with Kyoshi Nakabayashi from Japan's Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium (ALIC). More...