By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brock Read: At Educause, Little Optimism About Curbing Piracy, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog October 20, 2005

Short item summarizing the state of the affairs, as summarized in the title. I found this interesting: "When colleges sign up with those services, record companies tend to stop sending them complaints about individual copyright infractions, according to one administrator. 'Their notifications are stopping even though their peer-to-peer activity remains the same,' he said. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: RAMLET, IEEE-LTSC October 20, 2005

The concepts in this document won't be new to OLDaily readers, but this IEEE-LTSC working group is new, as is the acronym - 'Resource Aggregation Model for Learning, Education and Training', or RAMLET. Thus far all we have is the project document, with some use cases, and while the model is pretty heavily LMS based (and why do they call all the feeds a 'store' rather than a feed?) it is nonetheless moving in the right direction. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. John Hagel: From Push to Pull, Edge Perspectives with John Hagel October 19, 2005

I have to give John Hagel and John Seely Brown (JSB) credit: they know how to take an idea, package it, and run with it. The idea this time is the transformation from 'push' technologies to 'pull' technologies. It's a topic I've dealt with before, but never in any depth. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Harold Jarche: Provinent now "Vitesse Learning" October 19, 2005

Another merger. Harold Jarche reports: "After having recently merged with Fredericton's LearnStream, Provinent (of Toronto, with offices in Fredericton & Charlotteown) is now merged with US-based Vitesse Learning. This consolidates the e-learning content development field even more. We'll see if bigger is better in the next months and whether the new company hires more people or jettisons extra staff". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Matt Pasiewicz: Podcasting at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference ..., Educause October 18, 2005

The EDUCAUSE annual conference is now on, attracting everybody who's anybody in online learning. As D'Arcy Norman, who links us to the iTunes version, comments, the casts are just trickling in now, as the conference gets started. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Arthur Carty: A Global Information System Needs a Culture of Sharing, University Affairs October 17, 2005

A remarkable opinion column is published in University Affairs as Arthur Carty, former NRC president and current science advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, calls for "a culture of sharing" in Canadian science and research. It doesn't get better than this: "Above all, our goal must be to maximize the impact of research for societies everywhere, not just the developed world. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: MERLOT Grapevine, MERLOT October 11, 2005

MERLOT's Fall Issue of Grapevine is out. The main item concerns a new relationship between O'Reilly books and MERLOT - wonder whether the next Perl camel book is going to be peer reviewed... yeah, thought not. People who write software will recognize Safari not as a (dysfunctional) Apple browser but as a long-standing online books program run by O'Reilly (it has been, what, three years now?). More...