Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL [Slashdot:] 10:42:49 AM      Google It!.

Zen and the Art of Apache Maintenance [Slashdot:] 8:12:41 AM      Google It!.

Go Test Go. Greg Hodgins wrote in to let me know about Go Tests Go, a service that provides online tresting to Java enabled mobile phones. Tests are geared toward professional or scholastic test or exams, such as foreign language certification and are used by students for practice. Shows how far behind the times I am - I didn't know there were Java enabled mobile phones. GTG is a subscription service, as everything connected to mobile phones seems to be. By Various Authors, April, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 7:44:39 AM      Google It!.

Final Report for the AMeGA (Automatic Metadata Generation Applications) Project. The main conclusion of this report on automatic metadata generation is that "there is a disconnect between experimental research and application development. It seems that metadata generation applications could be vastly improved by integrating experimental research findings." The report also found that organizations are using various metadata encoding schemes - "one participant reported the use of seven different systems." The authors found broad support for automatic metadata generation but a desire to have it cgecked by human interpreters - a wise precaution. PDF and therefore difficult to read online. By Jane Greenberg, Kristina Spurgin, and Abe Crystal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February 17, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 7:42:57 AM      Google It!.

CMS interoperability?. Good overview of Content Management System (CMS) interoperability, a problem that will continue to grow as the number of CMSs increases. The author notes, "there still needs to be a common standard for the information itself, if meaningful interoperability is to be achieved. It is here that the difficulties arise, due to the lack of any consensus standards in this area." Quite right, and this is the one area of online learning standards development that has puzzled me - where have IMS, SCORM and the others been on a specification for learning objects themselves? David Wiley has referred me a couple of times to Connexions, which does support a Connexions Markup Language - but no authoring tool (I have been playing with the site this past week - they explain to me that the online editing tool is only available for published content, which means you can use the authoring tool only after you have authored the object... d'oh). By James Robertson , Step Two Designs, April 4, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 7:41:30 AM      Google It!.

Brian Lamb, Learning Objects, Wikis, Flickr, RSS-- They Wanted it All (No Fooling). As Alan Levine writes, "we got some good things going here." Brian Lamb is dishing out learning chaotic style and people are eating it up. Good presentation summary with numerous links to resources, wiki pages and other arcania. And you know - it's not just that people can be more productive with these new tools, it's not just that communication is improved - it's that they are more fun and more personal. Some people cann this sort of approach controversial - but from where I sit, the corporate, hierarchical, authroitarian model of learning is, or at least ought to be, much more controversial. By Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, April 04, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 7:40:07 AM      Google It!.

Carl Berger is Blogging!. D'Arcy Norman writes, "Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging!" This is good news, not so much because we get to read what he thinks (though this is no small bonus) but because he will now experience first-hand what we have been talking about all along, which could only mean good things. Actually, Berget is only one of a number of new bloggers at the Leadership Institute Blog at the Apple Digital Campus Exchange (sadly, you have to have an account to submit comments, and there's no way to register for an account, which makes it a prototypical Apple product). I'm not sure how long the blog will last, but if the writers keep coming up with content like this survey of what students (want to) use the web for (notice how poorly 'taking an online course' fared) then I certainly hope it's a permanent gig. By D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman dot Net, April 2, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 7:31:05 AM      Google It!.

The End of Mathematical Proofs by Humans? [Slashdot:] 7:28:11 AM      Google It!.

UMassOnline Enrollments Grow 19 Percent in Fiscal Year 2005. UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts' Web-based learning division, today announced that online education program revenue and enrollments grew by 30 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in fiscal year 2005 (July 2004 - June 2005). Revenue from the [Online Learning Update] 7:26:35 AM      Google It!.

Second Life Teaches Life Lessons. Players use the online game for all kinds of non-game purposes, from counseling abused kids to teaching business students to be entrepreneurs. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News] 7:18:43 AM      Google It!.