Your Software Rights or the Best Tools: Often a Sad Choice
One of the major reasons why I like having windows on my laptop (all my desktops are Linux) is, in addition to a wireless application that works, I can run Paint Shop Pro. More...

MPEG LA Issues First Collective DRM Patent License
A coalition of digital rights management (DRM) patent holders called MPEG-LA (Licensing Austority), including ContentGuard and Digitrust, has announced the first round of licenses for DRM technology. More...

E-Learning in the UK
A survey of e-learning in the U.K. shows that while it has become an essential part of the learning landsape, the CD-ROM remains the dominant delivery vehicle and that student attitudes remain a major obstacle. More...

Rapid E-Learning: A Growing Trend
"In a study of Fortune 500 companies conducted by Larstan Business Reports, 85 percent said they planned to expand the role of e-learning. More important, over 80 percent of respondents said that rapid e-learning strategies would make a significant contribution to the training initiatives in their companies... REL uses tools and processes that decrease development time dramatically. More...

The Importance of Being Permanent
Article touting the importance of permanent locations for online content, a dictum not followed by many nespapers and magazines (the focus of the article) but also educational staff and students, who must forge from scratch a new web identity every time they switch instititions. Having faced this myself twice in two years, I obtained my now permanent downes.ca address - but even so, my present employer insists that I use its official URL for web pages and email addresses - an address that it changed a year ago, wiping itself off Google and making my (minimal supply of) business cards obsolete. More...

Renaissance Prospects
Douglas Rushkoff "tries to picture connectedness and ecology as a base for a second Renaissance ("a rebirth of old ideas in a new context") as a deconstruction of the first Renaissance, the one that created (wo)man and economy" (Thomas N. Burg). I like Rushkoff a lot, and this 45 minute lecture doesn't disappoint. More...

Relative Effectiveness of Computer-based and Human Feedback for Enhancing Student Learning
The Spring, 2005, issue of the Journal of Educators Online is now available. I cite one article, this one looking at the effectiveness of computer-based feedback on test results. The not so surprising conclusion: feedback doesn't work if the students don't read it. More...

Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café
I love the use of nature photographs in this article to run a parellel threat interspersed with the discussion, which is an aggregation and summary of the critiques of folksonomies. The author's main intent is to defend the careful creation of metadata, and the sloppy and sometimes spammed metadata used in folksonomies is clearly not that. But from where I sit, folksonomies - as implemented by Technorati Tags - conflate two things: first, the idea of user-created classification, and second, aggregation of those classifications by what amounts to a 'push' technology. More...