Thursday, March 04, 2004

Robotic exoskeleton enhances human strength and endurance [Science Blog] 11:32:39 PM      Google It!.

Does open source software enhance security?. Analysis Yes, but not for the reasons many think [The Register] 11:29:52 PM      Google It!.

Canadian Supreme Court rules for plaintiff in copyright case. CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada,2004 SCC 13. The Canadian Supreme Court upheld the appeal of the Law Society of Upper Canada which was sued by several legal publishers for having photocopiers in its research library and maintaining a photocopy distribution service "in person, by mail or by facsimile transmission" for the society's members. ""Research" must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users' rights are not unduly constrained, and is not limited to non-commercial or private contexts. Lawyers carrying on the business of law for profit are conducting research within the meaning of s. 29. The following factors help determine whether a dealing is fair: the purpose of the dealing, the character of the dealing, the amount of the dealing, the nature of the work, available alternatives to the dealing, and the effect of the dealing on the work. Here, the Law Society's dealings with the publishers' works through its custom photocopy service were research-based and fair. The access policy places appropriate limits on the type of copying that the Law Society will do. If a request does not appear to be for the purpose of research, criticism, review or private study, the copy will not be made. If a question arises as to whether the stated purpose is legitimate, the reference librarian will review the matter. The access policy limits the amount of work that will be copied, and the reference librarian reviews requests that exceed what might typically be considered reasonable and has the right to refuse to fulfill a request. Some have remarked that this ruling constitutes a balance between user's rights and commercial interests. (Source: Interesting-People via Boing Boing Blog) [Open Access News] 11:25:56 PM      Google It!.

SCO confirms MS 'smoking gun' email is genuine. But neither smoking, nor a gun, insists SCO [The Register] 11:24:41 PM      Google It!.

Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux? [Slashdot] 11:23:44 PM      Google It!.

The Disposable Computer [Slashdot] 11:17:42 PM      Google It!.

Find works licensed with Creative Commons. Creative Commons, RDF-enhanced search PROTOTYPE. Now here's an interesting resource discovery tool. It searches for works licensed with Creative Commons. The search interface is rather primitive, but enables one to limit to media or format (e.g. video,audio). Moreover, the user can select "I want to make commercial use" and/or "I want to create derivative works" to further restrict search results. While the accuracy of searches is not yet clear, it can pull up some heretofore unseen and interesting (to say nothing of open) sites. (Source: creative Commons: weblog) [Open Access News] 2:29:31 PM      Google It!.

More on Creative Commons licensing and independent publishing. Annalee Newitz, Some Rights Reserved, San Francisco Bay Guardian (February 25, 2004). A news article points out benefits of alternative copyright arrangements such as those offered by Creative Commons. The success of Cory Doctorow's novels is given as an example, as well as comments from sympathetic publishers such as the University of California Press. Newitz includes some background from recent publishing history and illustrates parallels with the Free Software Foundation. The Public Library of Science's CC licenses are noted. While Newitz's report generally lauds the "some rights reserved" model, some opposing viewpoints are presented, expressing confusion about how revenue would be sustained, or just stating comfort with traditional copyright models and permissions. (Source: Creative Commons: weblog) [Open Access News] 2:28:58 PM      Google It!.

Digital 'Ghosts' To Guide Students On Campus "The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents. The ghosts are to compete amongst themselves for privileges such as better vocabulary or the ability to clone themselves. Ignored ghosts can die out completely. This project is a lot more serious than it sounds at face value - several papers have been published already." [Slashdot] Hopefully the librarian ghosts will guide them through information literacy, in which case they'll outlast all of the other ghosts.... [The Shifted Librarian] 2:27:25 PM      Google It!.

Administration Proposes Same-Sex-School Option. The Bush administration has proposed regulations giving public school districts new freedom to create same-sex classes and schools. By Diana Jean Schemo. [New York Times: Education] 2:25:53 PM      Google It!.

Philips Develops Fluid Lenses [Slashdot] 2:24:35 PM      Google It!.

GnomeMeeting 1.0 Videoconferencing/VoIP Released [Slashdot] 2:20:44 PM      Google It!.

Leaked Memo Says Microsoft Raised $86 million for SCO [Slashdot] 2:18:33 PM      Google It!.

Faculty Development and Learning Object Technology by Patricia Ploetz. I saw this paper referenced in DistanceEducator.com's March 3, 2004 Daily News release. The author's experiences match my own; the subtitle of her paper is "Bridging the Gap." There is a very wide gap between instructional technologists' understanding and acceptance of learning objects and the understanding and acceptance that regular faculty have about the what, why, and how of learning objects. The gap is even wider in smaller institutions that have little in the way of instructional support services. One reason that I've kept the EduResources Portal and the EduResources Weblog expanded to include sites and contents beyond learning objects is that most faculty are much more receptive to courses and lessons as shareable online units than to learning objects as units. JH _______ "The following paper begins with a story, the story of a lived experience that illustrates the mismatch between faculty and technology experts' understandings of learning object technology. It then takes a look at faculty perspectives, to show that moving from the traditional approach in content creation to developing learning objects requires a paradigm shift for faculty content developers. Recognizing the changes that faculty face, and understanding their insights regarding new learning technologies, gives faculty support staff an opportunity to 'put on' the faculty perspective. This 'putting on' activity provides technical support staff with the mental models necessary to support faculty in 'bridging the gap' between traditional content development activities and the creation and development of learning object technologies." "In my experience, when faculty speak about developing educational content, they traditionally use the following terms to describe the teaching/learning environment: courses, units, lessons, lectures, readings, projects, and/or activities. Terms such as learning objects, metadata, reusability, interoperability, accessibility, granularity, durability, and economy, while meaningful in a technological arena, often have little if any meaning for faculty. When I have asked, 'What do these terms mean to you?' faculty responses have included: 'They make me feel like I'm in Dilbert land' or 'Are we talking about education? These don't sound like education terms, or at least not ones that I'm familiar with' and 'They sound like buzz words that will soon give way to new buzz words.' While I admit to talking with a limited number of faculty, I sense that these responses are more representative than not, of many faculty in higher education." [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 2:17:24 PM      Google It!.

Where are open source course management systems being used?. One of the big "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt" questions I often get asked as someone who spends a fair bit of time looking at the course management system landscape is "But are open source systems really ready for use as enterprise systems?" (Up until recently one might have done well to ask the same questions of the commercial systems that alleged to be 'enteprise ready'!) I don't know what better way to respond than to simply point to where these systems are being used, so as some initial examples: sites running Moodle sites running Atutor (scroll down the page to see the list) case studies on 16 institutions representing over 60k users running .LRN There are lots of fears held by Directors of IT, EdTech and others (some justified, others extremely unfounded) that need to be addressed before it becomes easy to adopt open source for 'enterprise' needs. This should be an easy one, though - any open source project that seriously wants to be adopted and that doesn't actively solicit information on who is using it and share this back with potential users is clearly overworked or missing something. Better yet, segment your responses (k-12/colleges/universities/corporate training" might be a start for the education sector) so that people can point to a peer group and say 'look who else has adopted this software!' You'd be amazed how effective an argument this can be, especially as we move along the famous curve of innovation adopters (e.g. early and late majorities are like that for a reason.) - SWL [EdTechPost] 2:04:21 PM      Google It!.

Japanese deploy bi-lingual talking PDA. Domo origato, me old china [The Register] 2:03:07 PM      Google It!.

Structured change detection. Consider two versions of a Word document saved as XML. There are "structured diff tools that can map the changes at an intermediate level, in terms of XML elements. For example, IBM's AlphaWorks site offers he XML Diff and Merge Tool for Java, while Microsoft's GotDotNet site offers XML Diff and Patch for .Net. Both of these free tools can track element-level change. To get a sense of what's possible, check out Monsell EDM's online demo of its Delta XML technology. The demo compares two subtly different versions of a complex graphic -- the standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) "tiger" benchmark -- and animates the differences between the two. It's stunningly cool. As XML becomes the standard way to represent prose, graphics, and other content, we should expect such change visualization to become routine. What about code? It has sections, subsections, and paragraphs, too. XML isn't -- and probably shouldn't be -- the primary way we read and write code. But the underlying abstract syntax tree has structure that can -- and arguably should -- help us see and comprehend the code's evolution. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] Ordinarily readers call me on stuff like this, but for once I get a chance to beat them to the punch. This column certainly should have mentioned that Subversion, the open source project that aims to replace CVS, reached its 1.0 release last week. It looks really good, and I'm investing some time in learning how to deploy and use it. ... [Jon's Radio] 1:57:21 PM      Google It!.