Cascades and Connectivity
eLearn Magazine has published my response to a column by Michael Feldstein in the same publication a month ago. In his column, Feldstein warned of the danger of 'cascade phenomena' in networks - things like following a fad or buying into a market bubble. He recommends that networks be managed in order to reduce the risk. More...
New Media Journalism Ethics And The Marqui Blog Paid Assignment
I am first of all going to give credit to Robin Good for calling it like he sees it. He is being paid for talking about Marqui (and has a nice little logo attesting to the fact) and is defending his credibility in doing it. And he's even getting a link out of me for the paid spot! But it's going to be the last. Let me explain. It's not that I doubt his credibility or his honesty in reporting, even though he is paid. No, not that. More...
RSS: Show Me the Money
More on the ongoing commercialization of RSS. This article looks at RSS advertisements, something that will be a tricky proposition for advertisers. The difficulty is, readers choose the content they want to read, which means it's a lot harder to put an ad in front of them. Too many ads, and the reader simply tunes out. More...
Quality Matters: Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning
Personally, I think that quality is best managed by a system of reviews and recommendations. This is because, as the article notes, everybody sees quality differently. That said, the authors here suggest that people "might not even know what to look for in assessing quality" and so have created a rubric of 40 elements alongside a quality management program. More...
Designing Courses: Learning Objects, SCOs, IMS Standards, XML, SGML
Nice comprehensive list of resources related to learning objects. The author flags Canadian resources (with a little flag) but readers should note that many Canadian resources (some by Rory McGreal and Norm Friesen stand out, among others) are not flagged as such. More...
WebCT: A Major Shift of Emphasis
You have to read all the way to the end of this summary of changes introduced in WebCT Vista to get to the zinger: "With so many comparable open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT, one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive. More...
Firefox Spread Leads to Design Scrutiny, Built-In RSS Feeds
Good review of the new Firefox web browser with a balanced assessment of how the experience differs for those used to using Internet Explorer. Firefox is forcing web site designers to code to standards, argues the author (of course, if you do this then you have to fix the site to adjust to Internet Explorer's breaking of those standards). Also contains a short review of AOL's version of the Mozilla browser. More...
Google Scholar Beta
The subject line in the email read "Google Scholar roasted by Péter Jacsó" - and this is an understatement. What follows is as thorough a baking, broiling, slicing and dicing of a website as I have seen. The author makes his points, though, and has done his research, delving through the collection using undocumented search features to reveal, among many other things, that Google Scholar, while it claims to index Blackwell, lists only ten percent of the publishers 437,451 records in 755 journals. More...
Blogs, Tomorrow's Learning, and Why I Blog
Nice post that puts some pieces together, linking some motivtions for blogging with the idea of self directed learning with an observation on the range of learning available online, from the playfulness of Slashdot to the dedicated seriousness of an MIT course. More...
College Libraries: the Long Goodbye
Whatever replaces the library must be some kind of library, and that whatever replaces the book must be some kind of book. So it seems after reading this article, one in which the writer, a lover of libraries, comes to grips with the decline of the library (and appears to have moved into Stage Seven: Acceptance). More...
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