Saturday, January 15, 2005

Bush's Budget Will Seek Modest Rise in Pell Grants. President Bush told college students Friday that he would propose a modest increase in Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship program. By By DAVID E. SANGER. [NYT > Education] 9:38:47 AM      Google It!.

Saving Seed Is Latest Tech Piracy. Monsanto takes a page from the music industry's playbook, filing lawsuits against more than 100 farmers it accuses of biotech theft for saving its seed from one season to the next. [Wired News] - in the context where there are still starving people in the world it is time to "regulate" Monsanto and other companies that misunderstand their palce in civil society -- BL 9:37:27 AM      Google It!.

Willie Nelson Bets on Biodiesel. The 71-year-old country crooner isn't slowing down. He and three business partners form a company called Willie Nelson's Biodiesel. They're encouraging truckers to fill their tanks with eco-friendly fuel made from vegetable oils. [Wired News] 9:35:00 AM      Google It!.

Curious Blend of VPN, PDA and USB Drive [Slashdot:] this is model with great potential when the backend is a grid computer or some variant of the google grid.  It is sort of like a power access point if coupled with wirless usb where the enhanced infrastructure could become stable and the user devices could roam and evolve personalized usability. Looks like a opportunity for standards for secure usb computing would be the linchpin. -- BL 9:33:09 AM      Google It!.

E-learning Frameworks and Tools programme. it was only when Brian asked me for this that I realized I had forgot to store it someplace. [Edubloggers Links Feed] 9:25:28 AM      Google It!.

Flash is bigger than ever. It's been ages since my last post but these things are big enough that woke me up and made me blog about them: 1) You can compile actionscript 2 files into swf without the Flash IDE. I just installed MTASC... [blog-o-fobik] 9:24:29 AM      Google It!.

eTwinning : a new initiative from the European Commission. eTwinning is one of the four initiatives of the eLearning programme for 2004-2007. It was created to give schools the opportunity to learn from and with each other. It promotes the awareness of the multilingual and multicultural European model of soci [Online Learning Update] 9:22:58 AM      Google It!.

Evaluating the Development of Online Course Materials - George P. Schell, eLearn Magazine. If online courses are to become a permanent feature of higher education—not merely a fad of the dot-com era—college faculty must believe that developing online materials has academic value. In addition, such online education requires certain resource [Online Learning Update] 9:21:40 AM      Google It!.

Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning - Demetrios G Sampson, et al; Journal of Educational Technology and Society. The Semantic Web is the emerging landscape of new web technologies aiming at web-based information and services that would be understandable and reusable by both humans and machines. Ontologies, generally defined as a representation of a shared concep [Online Learning Update] 9:20:43 AM      Google It!.

Sentient Launch Repository With Word Interface. CETIS carries this brief write-up. "Claimed to be able to create IMS Content Packages, LearnBuild allows users to do most content creation and publishing operations from within Microsoft Word." By Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, January 12, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:18:21 AM      Google It!.

RSS_LOM. Work on RSS_LOM continues as Brian Sutherland offers another proposed revision. RSS_LOM has tested successfully in RSS aggregators, which means that it can be used to transport learning object metadata. Some open questions remain about the encoding of the metadata within the RSS file. The article also list five potential functions of RSS_LOM. By Brian Sutherland, Brian Sutherland's Journal, December 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:17:25 AM      Google It!.

Creative Problem-Solving Process. Dave Pollard writes, "It appears there may be as many as 12 steps in the process involved in solving problems or making critical decisions, whether in a business context or a broader social context." He presents this process in a useful and clear diagram. What's interesting is that the diagram makes it clear that problem solving is a distributed process, with no individual performing more than two or three of the twlve steps. My own work, for example, revolves around the 'Understand', 'Organize', and 'Think Ahead' steps. Perhaps 'Reach Out' as well. By Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, December 28, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:15:52 AM      Google It!.

The Yahoo Problem, And Its Solution. Dave Winer points to what he calls the 'Yahoo Problem' - the need for a website to list a long list of buttons to allow users of different RSS aggregator software to subscribe to a feed, or worse, a content site favouring one particular aggregator (as CNN does with Yahoo, hence the 'problem'). Winer outlines a solution involving a subscription server. Others recommend a less centralized solution, such as Mike Rowehl's Bitsplitter, which is more along the lines of what I would propose. By Dave Winer, Really Simple Syndication, January 12, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:14:28 AM      Google It!.

Network EducationWare. Scott Leslie finds the Holy Grail: an open source audio-visual web conferencing system. As Leslie notes, it was developed by Mark Pullen and others at George Mason University and has been around since 2002. Now that I have a newly expanded web server, installation and testing will begin on Monday. You can find NEW here. By Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, January 14, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:12:35 AM      Google It!.

National Guidance Research Forum. Graham Atwell sends this along: "The National Guidance Research Forum website is an exciting new website which has been designed for all those interested in guidance research." Atwell adds, "What I like is that many authors have been and are involved in developing the site. At a technical level they are integrating blogging with discussion in a plone based system and using rss and trackback to link different entries." By Various Authors, January, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:10:58 AM      Google It!.

Using a Wiki for Documentation and Collaborative Authoring. Wiki software for collaborative web publishing has emerged as one of the viable and inexpensive options to consider for maintaining group documentation. [Edubloggers Links Feed] 9:09:27 AM      Google It!.