Bill Brandon: Reading List

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:30:58 GMT

Analysts to CISOs: Learn about business.

(InfoWorld) - Chief information security officers (CISOs) need to learn more about the business side of the companies they work for to effectively communicate the importance of computer security, analysts said Wednesday at the Gartner IT Security Summit 2005 in London.

The relationship between business managers and IT security employees at many companies is "not very healthy at all" because of communication barriers, said Paul E. Proctor, a vice president with Gartner Inc.

Proctor advised security managers that "The future means that you've got to care about the business."

The most effective companies have a risk management officer, a person who can ideally understand technical security issues but be able to evaluate whether it's right to invest in equipment. That subjective information can be passed along to the business side, Proctor said.

That kind of evaluation is new and foreign to many businesses; however, a handful of companies are successfully integrating the two sides, he said.

The two-day Gartner conference focuses on how IT managers can deal with a range of security issues affecting their companies, including phishing of passwords, government compliance and consumer confidence.

The threats to computer systems have become greater, as people with lower levels of computer skills are successfully causing havoc with credit card information theft and money laundering, said Jay Heiser, research vice president with Gartner.

Awareness is increasing, but businesses are overly optimistic on how robust their systems are, he said. In particular, as more services are included in operating systems, there is more opportunity for unauthorized access.

"We think it's getting better, but we don't see that Windows will be innately secure in the next five years," Heiser said.

Other threats, such as viruses, means that you can't take a machine with the Windows operating system "out of the box and expect it to survive," Heiser said.

In a separate session, Klaus Brunnstein, a professor of applied informatics at the University of Hamburg, said risks come from software that is "full of programming faults." Programs have become so complex that the security remedies for them are also complicated, and it's difficult to identify flaws, he said.

E-mails containing active code hidden in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language) may have hidden, malicious content the user is unlikely to see, making it difficult to evaluate the risk, Brunnstein said.

The key to solving security issues lies with both the manufacturers and companies that use the systems, said Bob Bruce, vice president of Mobile Solutions for Nokia Enterprise Solutions.

By Jeremy_Kirk@idg.com (Jeremy Kirk). [InfoWorld: Top News]

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 19:18:36 GMT

Now that's a trip report!.

http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/techlearn_trip_.html

Mark Oehlert lets us know that Michael Parmentier's notes from the recent TechLearn 2003 are now online. Having tried to produce conference notes myself, I am awed at the thoroughness and real usefulness of these notes. One can actually get a sense of what each of the speakers was focused on, and even an overall sense of the conference. A great model to emulate in the future. - SWL

[EdTechPost]

Sat, 18 Oct 2003 04:07:09 GMT

More than one tool round here.

Dan talks about a basic strategy for providing faculty web presence. And notes that the main problem is "many of the discussions are not so much about which tools to provide, but about which one tool to provide". Oh, you don't know how much I agree!

Here are his 3 prongs:

A basic and easy web-based content-management system is a first priority. Most faculty members simply need to create a few web pages that can quickly and easily be updated, and possibly post some other file types for downloading. Frontier from Userland (and its Manila component) is the one I am most familiar with. Yes, it is a "blogging" tool, but it does a lot more than that, and I can vouch for the ease with which faculty can adopt this solution.
A learning management system is needed by some faculty members, particularly those who provide standalone online courses and/or need integrated grading features. In my view, while this type of software is necessary, it is not the best thing for most faculty members.
Support for "traditional" uploaded static sites is needed for those who use web design tools (e.g. Dreamweaver) to create their sites. Fewer and fewer faculty members will choose this path, but it is fairly inexpensive to support them. [dan mitchell's teachnology weblog]

[incorporated subversion]

Sat, 18 Oct 2003 04:05:34 GMT

B.C. Educational Technology Users Group 'Blogtalk'.

http://etugblog.typepad.com/blogtalk/

Today is officially the last day so I can finally let the cat out of the bag for those who haven't seen this yet.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the past two weeks I've been helping to facilitate, along with 4 other educators from B.C., an 'online discussion' on possible uses of blogs in education for the B.C. Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG). Many of you will recognize at least one of the other facilitators, Brian Lamb from UBC...

[EdTechPost]

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 14:01:38 GMT

Enclosure Extractor allows you "to easily extract and download enclosures from newsfeeds." [Scripting News]

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 13:59:23 GMT

Screen shot of Radio's enclosure prefs page. [Scripting News]

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 23:31:26 GMT

Syncato. If Jon Udell, Sam Ruby, Phil Windley, and many more people find it cool, I say chances are Kimbro Staken's Syncato might become the chic way to make a structured blog in a not-so-distant future. [via Alf Eaton]
[Seb's Open Research]

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 23:26:09 GMT

Making sense of weblogs in the intranet (in Lucent).

Thanks Dina for bringing it in. headshift moments on Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation:

Lucent's Michael Angeles has posted the slides from his presentation to the (US) Usability Professional Association's "Blogging in Corporate America" event in New York. His talk was called Making intranet weblog data usable.

The presentation, which is actully called "Making sense of weblogs in the intranet: What they are, why people are using them, making them useful for knowledge management", is must read. It gives a good example of talking about weblogs in a corporate world, tells a lot about intranet in Lucent and describes Lucent's approach to internal weblog support (strategy, which is not implemented yet).

[Mathemagenic]

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 19:34:09 GMT

A debate among librarians about aggregators: Con and Pro. [Scripting News]

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 19:33:04 GMT

Microsoft, Philly plan 'school of future'. The software titan spreads the brotherly love to Philadelphia, where it will help design and build a new high school wired with the latest in educational computing tools. [CNET News.com]

Another opportunity idea, although the specific school mentioned is three years away.

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 19:29:04 GMT

Waypath: better search in the blogosphere.

Sebastien Paquet writes about Waypath. Last few days I was exploring Waypath too, but Seb points to an interesting example of using it: Michael Fagan adds Waypath link to all external links in his weblog. Michael explains it:

For those using newer browsers, you will also see bw after most links. These are both for further information. The b link takes you to a page on Blogdex that shows other blogs that link to that same link. You can visit these other blogs to read what other people have to say on the topic. The w link takes you to a page on Waypath, that shows you blog posts that are related to that link. This is another way to find what other bloggers are saying.

It's a pity that I didn't find any explanation how to do it (I guess this is not manual). But I found something else: Waypath plug-ins for MT and Radio to add "related posts from Waypath" link to your posts. Will try it in the evening.

As I understood in this plug-in Waypath uses some kind of smart keyword search instead of linking to other posts using links texts/addresses. I wonder if it will work better than Radio's Google it! macro, which I don't find very useful.

Finally, Waypath also allows RSS subscription to your searches.

[Mathemagenic]

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 20:05:39 GMT

Educational Leadership Learning Network - ELLNet.

"The Vision of the Educational Leadership Learning Network (ELLnet) is to create a leadership community among Canadian Educational leaders who will actively share their experience and expertise through an electronic medium. " Came across this very obliquely - a new Canadian project to creating a national/international leadership learning curriculum framework using peer-to-peer learning object technology. Hmmm, where have I heard that phrase before. Any Canucks out there have any more info on this? - SWL

[EdTechPost]

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 20:03:39 GMT

Public domain image resources. "There are a number of sources of public domain images on the Web. The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain: you are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images..." [xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 20:46:52 GMT

Communities of Practice Documents.

Communities of Practice Documents.

Communities of Practice Documents: "The Community of Practice resources identified below represent some of the finest work available on communities of practice research and development."

[elearnspace blog]

Good collection of resources on communities of practice

[McGee's Musings]

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 20:42:19 GMT

Office users at risk from 'critical' flaw. Microsoft issues another herd of vulnerability reports, including a "critical" security hole in numerous Office applications that could let a hacker take control of a PC. [CNET News.com]

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 01:02:59 GMT

This Month's SideBars: Focus on CMS.

If you haven't seen it before, Sidebars is an always fun and educational newsletter produced by the staff of the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). This month they focus on all things CMS - they are undergoing their own change process currently and have published their well-worth emulating evaluation plan, and various staff also contribute pieces on a few existing open source choices as well as rolling your own CMS.

On this last one, I don't disagree that you can piece together a variety of inexpensive components that make up part of what we now think of as a standard CMS, but I'm pretty sure you can't get something that is entirely functionally equivalent, as well as integrated, without a lot of time, effort and money. This is where the CMS movement started from - trying to provide an easier way to access a common set of apps that were being implemented piecemeal. Whether one in fact needs all of that functionality is another question, a good one that doesn't often get asked enough, and again the folks at Sidebars point to a useful Syllabus article by the Steves from TLTR . Great issue. - SWL

[EdTechPost]

Things to do

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 03:17:11 GMT

e-Learning in Medical Education. I'm at the AMEE medical education conference in Bern this week. My presentation on 'Reusable learning objects, content syndication and resource discovery' was this morning. I'll put my presentation on the web when I get back for anyone who's interested though elements of it are scattered around this weblog already, in particular RSS autodiscovery for reusable learning objects. [David Davies' Weblog]

This would be a good basis for a series of entries on "how to" set up your own repository for your objects.

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 16:20:59 GMT

Simulations and learning (economics). This presentation on Aug. 20, 2003 at MCC presented an example of the use of simulation for economics instruction. [Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) Newest]

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 16:20:19 GMT

Eric Raymond on cognitive stress and knowledge work.

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have. A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I've come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for any ... [Armed and Dangerous]

Somehow, I missed this when it first appeared in May from Eric Raymond. I find his RSS feed erratic at best. It shows up at a good time, however, as I'm thinking through the implications of shifting focus to knowledge workers instead of knowledge management. Raymond is focused on user interfaces, but I think his perspective can be generalized to the challenges of doing and coaching knowledge work.

[McGee's Musings]

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 16:30:04 GMT

Simulation Classification System.

A classification system developed by Charlie Musselwhite that categorizes simulations by both levels of interactivity for the participant and the level of involvement needed by the facilitator. - SWL

- [Learning Circuits] via [Online Learning Update]

[EdTechPost]

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 16:26:46 GMT

The Defense Acquisition University Road Map for e-Learning.

Fascinating document by an organization that evidently takes its planning very seriously. Like it or not, the American military is heavily involved with online training and one of the few organizations with the size to be a true market maker. This report is as interesting for its picture of the how the field will develop over the next 5-10 years as it is for how they plan to respond to those changes. I especially liked the two charts on pages 30 and 31 on "e-learning convergence 'lagging inidcators'." - SWL

- from a list of reports at [The Masie Centre]

[EdTechPost]

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 23:31:30 GMT

Research.

The diagrams at the end of this article provide an effective argument for the value of "self-archiving" in order to extend the impact of research. The "closed" model of research follows an elitist path - journal submission, peer review, changes made based on review, published in journal, access only if facility has a subscription to the journal. While the process is healthy, it is closed...and knowledge is kept behind closed doors (doors closed as a result of high subscription pricing). The author proposes an extension to this model by using self-archiving...making the research available to a much larger audience for feedback...and increasing the potential that the work will have greater impact as a result of greater access.

[elearnspace blog]

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 16:12:28 GMT

Well, since the list won't be here forever, might as well capture some resources...

[Jim Flowers: Blogs and Education]

Thu, 29 May 2003 03:43:00 GMT

Technology search sites.

I came across this search site via Techno-News Blog: TechDictionary. Here's a few others:

[elearnspace blog]

Thu, 29 May 2003 03:41:54 GMT

Conferencing on the Web.

Conferencing on the Web is a great resource page of software for discussions on the web. Came across it via Jay's post on ICOHERE.

[elearnspace blog]