Monday, August 01, 2005

Creativity in online learning design. Online Classes Offer Virtual Dissection, but Gym Still Takes Sweat. As public schools rush to reconfigure courses so students can take them via the Internet, one of the unlikely new offerings in this vast experiment is online gym. By SAM DILLON. [NYT > Technology] 10:35:56 PM

RSS use questioned. Only 2 Percent Use RSS?. Latest Forrerster Research study claims that only 2 percent of all online households in America are using RSS. Highly contradictory to other research from companies like Jupiter Research … Direct and Related Links for 'Only 2 Percent Use RSS?' By rss_feedback@lockergnome.com (Rok Hrastnik). [Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips] 10:26:37 PM

Take your broadband with you. This is said to be for students, but the prices are high for that audience, and the services seem skimpy (to me anyway). BellSouth launches wireless broadband. (InfoWorld) - SAN FRANCISCO - BellSouth Corp. on Monday launched a commercial wireless broadband service designed to travel with subscribers as they move from place to place. The service debuted in the university community of Athens, Georgia. The service comes in two versions: one offers a top speed of 384K bps (bits per second) downstream and 128K bps upstream for US$29.95 per month, while the other provides as much as 1.5M bps downstream and 256K bps upstream for $39.95 per month. Both come with five e-mail accounts, 10M bytes of Web hosting space and 20 hours per month of dial-up Internet access as a backup, Randall said. BellSouth charges $99.99 for the modem. [InfoWorld: Top News] 10:24:30 PM

WebEx hangs in there. WebEx to buy Intranets.com for $45 million. (InfoWorld) - NEW YORK - WebEx Communications Inc. said Monday it has agreed to buy collaboration software developer Intranets.com Inc. for $45 million in cash. The deal allows WebEx to take out a rival that had aggressively chased the smaller end of WebEx's core market, Web conferencing services. [InfoWorld: Top News] 10:18:50 PM

Breeze-ing up. Macromedia offers Breeze conferencing package. Company has bundled Breeze 5 with other offerings, established an "event service team" and introduced a promotional rate for the package. [CNET News.com] 10:14:55 PM

Edu Blog Hosting. So the good news is that there finally seems to be some options for teachers wanting to implement Weblogs in thier classrooms in ways that are safe and effective. I'm in the process of putting together an overview of four of them that will be included in the book: Blogmeister, from David Warlick WordPress Multi User, hosted by James Farmer NL Communities, offered by Alan November Manila from Userland.com. I may be wrong, and please tell me if I am, but I think those are the only four that offer the teacher preapproval of student posts/comment moderation capabilities that seem to be requirements for most educators starting out. With any luck, I'll have a breakdown posted later this week. [Weblogg-ed News] 2:29:47 PM

Is 2006 the year of the e-Book? "The e-book market still has three uncertainties. The first is suitable devices. The second is publishers releasing books, and the third is library lending. Before e-books can take off, these issues need resolution." [TeleRead] 11:15:46 AM

© Copyright 2005 Bill Brandon.