Tuesday, November 08, 2005

open source Supreme Court Lets Utilization Rights Stand. [Slashdot] "Essentially if someone owns a physical copy of software, then they are allowed to modify the code as part of their regular use, no matter what other agreements are in place." 6:10:11 PM    comment

eContent Court Finds For Student In Web FOS Case. [Slashdot] 6:05:36 PM    comment

open source PostgreSQL 8.1 Available. [Slashdot] 7:41:08 AM    comment

decision making Switching Colleges Is Common but Takes a Toll, Study Finds. A new survey has found that college students who switch schools or take courses at more than one school are less engaged in the intellectual and social life of their campuses. By KAREN W. ARENSON. [NYT > Education] 5:44:41 AM    comment

eContent Virtual dissection and physical collaboration - Kenneth R. Fleischmann, First Monday. This paper explores how software can be designed for individual use or for collaboration in the physical or virtual world, focusing on physical collaboration. The case study explored is the design and use of frog and human dissection simulation software. [Online Learning Update] 5:42:27 AM    comment

eLearning platform Wake-Up Call: Open Source LMS - Sam S. Adkins, Learning Circuits. There is a growing market demand for Open Source learning management system (OS LMS) products. This demand has attracted the attention of many corporate and government clients. Clients have begun to ask if Open Source LMSs are now viable alternatives to c [Online Learning Update] 5:41:22 AM    comment

video How-to Links: Video Podcasting. Although I haven’t had the good fortune of bringing home an iPod video, I’ve been excited about RSS-based subscription video for a while. Readers of this blog may recall my preference for FireAnt, a video and audio aggregator/player that was around long before iTunes began supporting subscription media. (I prefer the Mac version of FireAnt, but primarily use the Windows version to watch videos on my PC laptop.) The recent launch of the iPod video has led to renewed interest in RSS-based subscription video, and some in higher ed are taking the plunge. Karine Joly at Collegewebeditor.com highlights this trend in a nice post about admission video podcasting efforts via iTunes at Savannah College of Art and Design. So, what does it take to pull this off? The quickest path is to use a miniDV recorder, a simple editing/conversion program such as iMovie (Mac), a blog, and an RSS feed. Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi provide a free screencast tutorial showing how to put all the pieces together. I’ve done it; it’s extraordinarily easy, and fun. The video quality you can get from relatively inexpensive cameras (such as this Panasonic 3-chip model) is simply astounding. Want some behind-the-scenes information from a serious practitioner? Andrew Baron, creator and producer of Rocketboom, a popular daily videoblog, was recently interviewed on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (link via Micro Persuasion). He talks about details like video compression–something you’ll want to consider if you decide to get into the business. He also talks about the hardware and software he uses to watch videos himself (hint: not iPod video, and not iTunes). [Syndication for Higher Ed] 5:37:30 AM    comment