OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
July 26, 2004

Globe and Mail Registration
I am a frequent reader of the Globe and Mail online and also a frequent purchaser of the printed version of the newspaper. I receive the daily email alerts, and as has so often been the case, clicked on a link from the Daily Tech Alert. Imagine my surprise when, instead of the story about Google's IPO I expected to read, I was confronted with a registration page. This time it's personal. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, July 26, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Learning Material Repositories - Rafts or Battleships? - Part 2
Carried over from Pasrt 1, this article looks at the incredibly high barrier to entry to e-learning technologies and what to do about it. "What is required are tools and environments which don't assume that learning objects are necessarily contained within their repository system but which can either 'pull' objects from a variety of sources and repositories, or provide the means by which relevant objects can be found and accessed." By Derek Morrison, Auricle, July 23, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Blogs and Wikis as WebQuest Tasks
Short but nice presentation, with a number of good links, on the use of blogs and wikis in webquests. From the presentation: Three that seem immediately applicable to blogs are Simulated Diary, Travel Account, and Historical Story. Imagine, for example, if the Experiencing India's Caste System WebQuest was wrapped around a collection of blogs, one for each caste, and pulled together under one master page as in The Spot." By Bernie Dodge, NECC 2004, June 25, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Reservations from IEE for Scientific Publishing Report
Tired, tired, tired. That's all I can say about this press release documenting the Institution of Electrical Engineers's (IEE) "grave reservations regarding the Science and Technology Committee's call for scientific publishers to move to an open-access publishing mode." Peter Suber skewers the response thus: "It objects that the upfront funding model will compromise peer review (reply), that it will exclude work from poor countries (reply), and that it will allow research corporations that formerly paid subscriptions to get OA journals for free (reply)." By Press Release, IEE, July 21, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

How Emerging Technologies May Soon Replace Established Telecom Infrastructures
No breakthrough yet, but you have to think that we're in the last days of traditional telephone service. "The time, technology and economics have arrived to make it possible for any sufficient number of us to create our own independent telephone system and to be free from telecom providers and monthly phone bills forever." By Unknown, Kolabora, July, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

autounfocus
David Wiley's autounfocus is back and at a new location, http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/. The RSS Feed has also moved. By David Wiley, autounfocus, July, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

UKeU - Peeling the Onion - layer 2
Derek Morrison's dissection of the UKeU hearings was pre-empted by the release of the official (uncorrected) transcripts of the hearings, but I'm sure the official version doesn't capture the testiness of the exchange as well as this summary. One the one hand, we have Sir Anthony Cleaver saying " ... one should have given this the chance to succeed or you should not have started it. I think, having started it, they owed it to us to give us long enough to show that we could be successful ..." On the other hand, we have the queries about the 9.5 million Pound e-learning contracted to Sun. "So what's going to happen to the apparently valuable asset? Not much according to John Beaumont: 'I would be suprised if it was able to be widely used ... it's not a simple application, people would need to be trained on it, people would need to know how to support it ... '" Ouch. I don't think Sun will be too welcome in London for a while. By Derek Morrison, Auricle, Ju,ly 26, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Funded Projects - Canada
Some program funding announcements for Canadian readers. CANARIE has announced a Request For Proposals for the New Media Research Matrix; three or four projects will be selected, with program funding not to exceed $400,000 for any given project. Your deadline is August 12. CANARIE is also accepting IWAY Awards submissions until September 24. The Office of Learning Technologies has also issued a Call for Proposals - Community Learning Networks for its 2004 funding program, with assistance available of up to $600,000 over three years. Deadline for applications to this program is August 31. Guidelines are here. By Various Authors, Government of Canada, July, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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