Free/Open Source Software in Education
This 55 page PDF is an authoritative guide to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in education. The author describes the advantages of open source, surveys major open source tools, discusses migration to open source, and adds a section on educational open source applications. More...

List Feeds
Just for fun, and in view of some recent discussion, I have created an RSS 2.0 feed for IT FORUM. I have also created a feed for DEOS-L. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, August 13, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

Style: a Pleasure for the Reader, or the Writer?
Because I write for an audience every day (a discipline that wonderfully focuses the mind) I find myself attending to questions of style on a regular basis. According to the author, the vast majority of students cannot write (or, at least, cannot write clearly). More...

Issues arising from DCMI Abstract Model
This paper is obscure but will be found worthwhile by the metadata community. It is essentially a list of issues raised in the Dublin Core metadata architecture. Worth a more general readership (but unlikely to get one) is the last section. More...

Copyright Issues in Digital Media
For people familiar with the copyright debate this essay won't introduce a lot that is new, but is worth a read nonetheless in order to view the issues from the point of view of economic efficiency, the only consideration countenanced by the authors. More...

'Stealing Songs is Wrong' Lessons Head for UK Schools
As this article sardonically observes, "The [British] government seems to be falling hook, line and sinker for the curious notion that you need to understand that downloading music is stealing before you can possibly learn about, to make and to enjoy music." Being less obscure, I would observe that this is the plain placement of propaganda in the classroom. More...

Re: Acacia Media Technologies Corporation
Russell Poulin sent this enormously useful post to the DEOS-L mailing list regarding the Acacia patent claim. As another reader notes, "Acacia has targeted distance education for courses that use streaming or downloadable audio and/or video." Poulin responds that "WCET has been collecting information related to the Acacia patent issue and sharing it." What follows is a detailed set of links and resources. More...

Expertise Finders: Pollard Goes Looking for Answers
George Siemens points to this item by Dave Pollard in which he asks, "How can we ever hope to produce effective Expertise Finders when we can't even get people in our own organizations to keep their personal information up to date?" It's what I try to convince people of in my own projects, that input is critical, and everything else is gravy. More...

Virtual Worlds are Real Worlds
Raction to an article in the Guardian about online worlds titled Get a Life. The author's point is simple, and one with which I am in agreement: virtual world are real. They are just as real, in fact, as the 'real world'. More...