By Stephen Downes
January 9, 2004
New Laws Will Make Spam Worse
In
my predictions paper a couple of weeks ago I said that new
anti-spam laws would effectively legalize spam, making it
worse. The laws are in effect now, and the early result is
that they are making spam worse. "The US Can Spam Act
became law on 1 January, but US email security company
Postini saw the proportion of spam rise from 74 per cent in
December to 84 per cent within the first couple of days of
the new year." I'd like to take some credit for this
prediction, but as predictions go, it was a pretty easy one
to make. This failure of the legal approach will now force
people to think more seriously about a technological
solution. By Dinah Greek, VNU.Net, January 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Try It!
I don't know how long ASTD
has been doing this - it looks like it has been a while -
but it's a great service. On this page is a list of current
demonstration software and trials - all of them free - to
help developers see what's on the horizon. Gosh, wouldn't
this be a great page to have its own RSS feed? Wouldn't it
also be great if the page allowed users to enter comments
on the products they are trying? The extra content would
hardly cost ASTD a dime - but would make the location
the place to be to scope out new tech. By Various
Authors, Learning Circuits, January, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
WebTurbine Impacts Learning
Just a
quick glimpse from NASA into the future: "Educators and
students can become Web publishers of information that
includes live, always-changing content using the limited
resources available to them. Sharing this content amongst
themselves, remote peers at other schools and/or becoming
directly involved with NASA and its partners becomes part
of the daily curriculum. The student becomes a contributor
and partner, and, in doing so, gains the perspective and
motivation to become an active participant in the quest for
knowledge." That's it. That's the model. That's what I'm
trying to work toward on a wider scale. By Larry
Freudinger, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Fall, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Project Gutenberg 's Anabasis
Via
Open Access News: Why have ebooks failed thus far? We can
get at this by looking at why Project Gutenberg does not
use image scans of printed texts: "eople are not interested
in scans. Some Project Gutenberg sites each hand out 10
million eBooks per year -- impossible with scanned images
or full text eBooks due to their bandwidth-consuming
oversize. The "scanners" want to be the only source for
"their" books, even when those books are in the public
domain -- and are willing to claim copyright on the public
domain works of Project Gutenberg in the process. They deny
themselves true access to the public... Additionally, the
huge scan files hold just a single book, are not
searchable, cannot be copied, indexed, or cited by off the
shelf applications, typos can't be corrected, and are not
truly portable due to their size." By Sam Vaknin, UPI,
January 7, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Do Web Search Engines Suppress
Controversy?
Interesting article that touches on
distance learning by using the David Noble 'digital diploma
mill' controversy as one of five examples. The author asks,
do we search engines stifle controversial subjects? There
is some evidence that some such issues do not show up in
simple searches, but this is more a result of social
factors, not technological. In the discussion there is an
interesting distinction drawn between the 'organizational'
web of "companies, universities, trade associations,
consortia, alliances, and government agencies", and the
'analytic web', consisting of "full–text (or tables of
contents) journals, technical reports and preprints,
opinion pages, bibliographies, and pages of links to
these." While the former is well interlinked, the latter is
not. I think there is more than could be more said about
this. Why do we present our analytic works online as
dead-end linkless PDF files? By Susan L. Gerhart, First
Monday, January 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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