By Stephen Downes
May 5, 2003
Corante on Blogging
After much
urging (including a missive from your truely) Corante has
finally added RSS feeds for its regular blogs. There's a
full list here; some of them will be added to Edu_RSS
(which is growing rapidly and will soon be getting
subject-specific channels in order to handle the volume).
By Hylton Jolliffe, Cornate, May 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
RSS Feeds Into Blackboard
A
demonstration of RSS feeds in Blackboard. Screenshots and
scripts. Heh. So much for vendor-specific libraries of
content. By Alan, Cogdogblog, May 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical
Piracy
I think that this is more of a scare
tactic than anything real. But according to this report,
the music industry is "quietly financing the development
and testing of software programs that would sabotage the
computers and Internet connections of people who download
pirated music, according to industry executives." It's not
clear that the industry is on safe legal ground. "Some of
this stuff is going to be illegal," said Lawrence Lessig, a
professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in
Internet copyright issues. "It depends on if they are doing
a sufficient amount of damage. The law has ways to deal
with copyright infringement. Freezing people's computers is
not within the scope of the copyright laws." It would
certainly seem to undermine industry's position against
hacking should they use such tactics as a political tool.
I'm not sure they would be successful in a war against the
world's best - most of whom are lined up against them - in
any case. By Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times, May 4,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
College Students Bond Over File-Swapping
Suit
Students at the normally conservative
Michigan Technological University rallied in support of one
of their colleagues after he was sued by the RIAA for
sharing online music. This item is significant because it
shows the huge task facing the RIAA: how do you convince
their entire subscriber base that what they're doing is
wrong? This task becomes a lot harder when, from the
students' point of view, it is manifestly not wrong. By
Stanley A. Miller II and Dean Egan, Milwaukee Journal
Sentinal, May 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Access Management, the Key to a
Portal
The authors describe exactly the wroing
way to go about creative a subject-specific portal with
access to a wide range of materials, but because so many
people are interested in this model the paper is of some
relevance. At the heart of this model is a bilateral
agreement between the institution and the content provider.
Then, through a cascading ladder of user authentication
procedures an individual at the institution can access
protected and encrypted information from the provider. This
hasn't worked anywhere else in online content; I don't
understand why people think it will work in education. By
Francisco Pinto and Michael Fraser, Ariadne, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
RSS - Sharing Online Content
Metadata
Overview article looking at the use of
RSS to create content sites and portals. Good list of
references. By Peter Cliff, Cultivate Interactive, July,
2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Syndicated Content: It's More Than Just Some
File Formats
This article is an introduction to
the use of RSS for the syndication of content. After a
description of the format, with some XML examples, the
author provides a number of practical recommendations about
the type of RSS to use, the nature and number of listings
to provide, and comments on clarity of comment. By Paul
Miller, Ariadne, May, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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