DotGNU Portable.NET
Rhys Weatherley's Southern Storm Software, of Brisbane, Australia, is well known in the open source movement for being a "dotGNU's one-man army." So it is no surprise to learn that his latest project now stands at a quarter million lines of code. More...

User Payments: Predictions for 2001 Revisited
I don't know... what would you think if it cost you money everytime you read OLDaily? What would you think if it cost you one cent and the amount was automatically added to your ISP bill at the end of the month. More...

Education, Innovation & The Internet: Nobel Laureates Look To The Future
A survey of 71 Nobel laureates says that "universal access to the Internet would bring about enormous benefits and improvements to the educational system because of the Internet?s unparalleled ability to spread knowledge and disseminate information." The internet would also have helped them conduct their research more quickly and it will play a key role in improving the overall quality of life. More...

SBC Survey Looks At World Wide Web's Past, Present And Future On 10-Year Anniversary
Communications services company SBC finds in a survey that the internet will play an increasingly important role in our lives. Of note is the list of ways the internet will improve society. More...

It's Official: E-Mail Supplants the Printed Letter at the U. of Colorado at Boulder
It was bound to happen. Email has officially replaced printed documents at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Students are required to have a university email account (but they can autoforward their mail to HotMail or whatever, so access isn't really a problem). More...

Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Kai Stinchcombe, HackerNoon, 2017/12/27
This is a pretty thorough debunking of the idea that blockchain technology will disrupt industry. Kai Stinchcombe looks at several putative use cases - payment and banking, anonymous transactions, micropayments, bank-to-bank transfers, smart contracts, distributed ledgers and storage, stock transfers, authentication - and in each case shows that the hard parts are not addressed by blockchain. More...

The Rise and Fall of Baby Einstein
Ruth Graham, Slate, 2018/01/15
This is a case study that will probably be repeated for some time. Baby Einstein launched more than 20 years ago with the proposition that selected videos could propel children into advamced achievement. It was acquired by Disney in 2001. More...

PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn't)
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2018/01/25
My history intersects with that of Plato, but this intersection is short. Plato was, indeed, a computer0aided instruction (CAI) system, even as late as the 1990s when I looked at it. That made it innovative (though by 1990, not that innovative). But what it wasn't, in any way sense or form was open. A school like ours would invest either in Plato or in the internet; there wasn't a middle ground. More...

Living and Learning
Emmett Hall, L.A. Davis, Connexions, 2018/01/05
Subtitled "The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario" this document dates from 1967 and was mentioned in a post from Doug Peterson today. In 1967 I was in school would move to Ontario the following year. So I am the outcome of this policy, to some extent. More...