Monday, November 01, 2004

How Infants Crack the Speech Code [Slashdot:] 8:43:10 PM      Google It!.

Our Code is Falling to Pieces. Doug McGill on the Fading Mystique of an Objective Press. This article is unpleasant reading for anyone who thinks that the system works, but now that we have blogging standing as an alternative to journalism, we are beginning to see more clearly where the system is collapsing in on itself. "It's a matter of routine that reporters feel or know they are being lied to," writes the author. "Yet they take the quotes and pass them on, unchallenged. And they rationalize this essentially corrupt practice - corrupt that is from the point of view of the democracy that the media purportedly supports - any number of ways." It seems to me - and I have often talked about the similarities between journalism and education - that this applies to teaching as well. The task is not merely to pass on facts, unchallenged, like a machine, but to enter into a conversation, not only with the student, but also with the source of the knowledge being passed on. Teachers are the reporters of knowledge for students - and we rue the day teachers even lose their passion for the truth in the way, it seems, much of the commercial press have. By Jay Rosen, PressThink, October 29, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:39:48 PM      Google It!.

ERIC gets $34.6 million upgrade. The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), a repository of 16 separate clearinghouses for educational journals and abstracts, gets a new lease on life with this multimillion contract to a private agency. Syracuse University has continues the popular AskEric service under a new name, the Educator's Reference Desk. By Florence Olsen, FCW.com, November 1, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:37:45 PM      Google It!.

India Taps China's Reserve of Technological Talent. Indian companies are quickly concluding that only China has a worker base equal to India’s in terms of cost, quality and scale. By By SARITHA RAI. [NYT > Technology] 8:36:00 PM      Google It!.

Macromedia hopes it can Captivate us all - Chris Reynolds, Computerworld. Macromedia targets its Captivate product at the booming e-learning market. With a whole clutch of enhancements, Macromedia has tried to make it really easy to prepare, deploy and evaluate online course material. Captivate was once known as RoboDemo but [Online Learning Update] 11:26:43 AM      Google It!.

Learning Objects: A Practical Definition - Rory McGreal, Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Learning objects (LOs) enable and facilitate the use of educational content online. Internationally accepted specifications and standards make them interoperable and reusable by different applications and in diverse learning environments. The metadata [Online Learning Update] 11:25:52 AM      Google It!.

Grid Computing: Conceptual Flyover For Developers [Slashdot:] 11:25:13 AM      Google It!.

World's First Ultra-Thin Multilayer Circuit Board [Slashdot:] 11:24:25 AM      .

Ariadne Article - 'What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?'. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/ Score one for the librarians! This article by Carol Jean Godby of the OCLC is an absolute bombshell and a must-read for folks working with learning object metadata standards. She follows up on works by Norm Friesen and Lorna Campbell that survey existing application profiles of the IEEE LOM with a view to answering three main questions: Which elements are most widely adopted? What are the prospects for interoperability given these profiles and the entirely optional nature of any of the elements What can be learnt about the motivation for developing an application profile (a.k.a. why can't us educational technologist just submit to one standard way of describing things or let the librarians do it) Somewhat unsurprisingly, like Friesen and Campbell before her, she reports that the most used fields from the LOM can be easily mapped to the existing Dublin Core fields, and that we're pretty much all over the map when it comes to all of the special 'pedagogical' type fields that were supposedly the motivation for this whole exercise in the first place. (more...) [EdTechPost] 11:21:13 AM      Google It!.

Gartner Sees Shift to Bite-Sized Business Software. FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Companies such as SAP and IBM must break their software packages into smaller units as their corporate clients want to cherry pick them to update systems more frequently, consultancy Gartner said on Monday. [Reuters: Technology] 11:17:13 AM      Google It!.