The Digital Optimist
"A journalist by trade," George Lorenzo reports on trends he observed while conducting research for an article on e-learning. Most of what he reports is consistent with my own observations, and a few of his points are worth noting. More...
How I Would Implement Weblogs in Business
I think the key question is: would anybody be this honest in a business setting: "Using a Weblog, I could chronicle the daily activities, learnings, experiences and developments of the community. As the community grew and interest spread, the Weblog could have become the best single resource for understanding the internal workings of the community, why it works, what we'd learned, what the manager does, what the members think, etc." No, probably not. More...
Those Who Can't
I passed on this article when it came out last week, but it has since attracted a raft of commentary on the WWWEDU mailing list, so perhaps I have misjudged the mood (hey, it happens sometimes). The gist of the article is that "Teacher training is lagging the adoption of technology." The majority of posters on WWWEDU agree, citing examples where students take over the operation of projectors and other equipment. More...
Symbol Grounding and Extensible Aggregators
This is a difficult article (you can tell by the fact that even the title needs a little interpretation). But it gets at the heart of a debate that is gradually engaging the entire XML community. In a nutshell: how do you know what the names in XML tags mean? In traditional XML, they are defined in a fixed vocabularity (such as IEEE-LOM). In RDF, they are defined by various name-spaces, which may be mixed and matched. More...
Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World
This paper on copyright in the digital age takes on a relentlessly legalistic point of view, perhaps understandable given its source, but quite dissatisfying to the reader. It's a good overview of the legal opinions in the United States regarding copyright, but the paper has an unfortunate tendency to convert legal opinion into fact - for example, the declaration of a U.S. court that Kaaza falls under its jurisdiction does not make it so, nor does the declaration that 'shrink wrap licenses' are enforcable mean that people have somehow "agreed" to thereby waive their right of fair use. More...
Gentoo Package Accused of Violating DMCA
Before demanding that service providers "remove or disable access" to internet accounts, publishers should actually determine whether a file such as INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip is an unauthorized copy of PacMan or whether it is (as it is in this case) something else entirely. More...
Calculator
It seems like an odd use of billions of dollars worth of technology, but Google can now be used as a calculator. "To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. More...
The E-book vs the Ordinary Book
The latest IFETS discussion paper is out and the criticism has already started, one writer commenting - accurately - that the article is nothing more than a series of unsubstantiated assertions. More...
Searching For the Personal Touch
This article is unfortunately vague, but the upshot is potentially important: companies have launched in 'stealth mode' that offer the potential for personalized search. Great in concept, this is hard to do well. More...
Gestalt and Typography
The concepts of proximity and similarity play major roles in my own theories of cognition and therefore of learning in general. More...
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