By Stephen Downes
July 28, 2003
MELCOE
Just opened, Macquarie
University’s E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) has
embarked in its new role as the stewards of Australia's
COLIS system. As CETIS's Wilbert Kraan writes, "That stewardship of the COLIS
project also gives a clue about the focus of the centre:
the practical and pedagogical implications of e-learning
interoperability standards. Hence the fact that one of the
plans with COLIS is to demonstrate the robustness of IMS
specs by ripping out parts of COLIS and replacing them with
equivalent new ones from different vendors." This will be a
project that bears watching. Some good papers and resources
have already been posted. No RSS feed, though. *grumble* By
Various Authors, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Copying is Theft - And Other Legal
Myths
This article takes a long time to make a
small point, but it is a point well worth making. File
sharing is not theft. Who says so? The U.S. Supreme
Court. "So the RIAA and MPAA's claims that all 'copying' is
'stealing' are much overhyped." Most of this article deals
with infringing and non infringing uses of content, and
while it does not in any sense endorse the free-wheeling
sharing of content, neither does it come close to the
record industry's view that any sort of copying is a crime.
Good article. By Mark Rasch, The Register, July 28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Top eLearning Reference
Sources
Seb remarks that I will be pleased to be
cited twice in Jay Cross's list of the fifteen places he
heads to first for e-learning news. The other place, of
course, is Edu_Rss, which isn't really me, it's just
software I wrote - and interestingly, the only completely
automated system on Jay's list. By Jay Cross, Internet
Time, July 27, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Tim O'Reilly interview: Digital Rights
Management is a Non-starter
Digital rights
management (DRM) will not succeed, argued publisher Tim
O'Reilly in this interview. By DRM, though, O'Reilly means
the enforcement of rights through encryption or other
security. In this he's right; in the end, you have to allow
the viewer to view the content, and that's your moment of
weakness. There are no copy protection schemes for the
brain. That doesn't mean that there will be no online sales
of content - O'Reilly actually sells many products - it
just means that you have to make the products cheaper and
easier to buy than to copy. By mrspin, stage4, July 27,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Sharing the Code
Good article
discussing the range of considerations faced by college and
university administrators when considering whether to
deploy open source software. Though the article raises the
usual issues - such as the expertise required to manage
open source software - it also raises some less widely
noted points, such as the strong support open source
software users can get from the user community. There is a
list of open source products at the end of the article,
though even a little digging would have unveiled a much
longer list. By Florence Olsen, Chronicle of Higher
Education, August 1, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Even 'Obvious' Ideas Can Be Protected With
Patents
More discussion regarding the 'business
method' patents issued in our field. I know their
supporters claim that they spur innovation, but really, how
could this be? If Tim O'Reilly had patented 'banner ads'
back in the early 90s, it would have posed a huge barrier
to online commercial content, and likely derailed the
development of sites like Yahoo! and even eBay. By Justin
Pope, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A&M May Stop Presses in Journalism
Program
See, this is why people pose long,
lingering questions about the current economic model
assumed by higher education institutions. "One reason Texas
A&M University is proposing to eliminate its 50-year-old
journalism program is because it is too popular. In the
last several years, the number of students majoring in
journalism has mushroomed by as much as 50 percent,
contributing to high turnover and burnout among the handful
of faculty members." Imagine Microsoft saying it would
discontinue Windows because too many people were buying
copies. Or Coca-Cola halting production of Coke because it
is too popular. A business model that cannot accommodate
demand is... dead. By Ron Nissimov, Houston Chronicle, July
28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Put “Earn” in Your Learning
Some
readers have commented on the fact that OLDaily doesn't
cover the corporate space as much as it might. But this is
that community's own doing: if you're not going to give us
anything to read, how do you expect newsletters like
OLDaily to cover you? For those of you in corporate space
wondering how to get information out about your products
and services - this is how to do it: create some engaging
commentary, put it out there for free on the net, and watch
the readership spread. This article presents this new
company's approach to the return on investment (ROI) of
e-learning. Some nice diagrams, and a good characterization
of a model involving an initial course and ongoing (online)
support. The paper also emphasizes performance assessments
as a means of calculating e-learning ROI. Now it's not easy
to capture the imagination of the online readership; there
is a lot of competition and your topic has to be novel and
engaging. And this article isn't quite that. But it's a
start, and if the company has a unique vision it will
become apparent as it posts more articles and commentaries.
And it will need to spread the word about its publications.
Sending me an email about it was a good start. Setting up
an RSS feed would be a logical next step. Just be sure to
keep it easily accessible - if you try to 'extract value'
from the publication by collecting email addresses or some
such thing, you'll just kill your readership - and you
won't get listed in OLDaily. By D. Verne Morland, ROI
Learning Services, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
ARIADNE Knowledge Pool
System
Looking for examples of learning object
metadata (LOM) to play with? Erik Duval sends this note to
IFETS: You may be interested in the LOM instances generated
off the ARIADNE Knowledge Pool System, using the XML
binding under development at the IEEE LTSC (http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~erikd/LOM/
and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ieee-ltsc-lom-xml).
These instances are available at http://rubens.cs.kuleuven.ac.be:8989/ariadne/.
By Erik Duval, ARIADNE, July 27, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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