By Stephen Downes
March 4, 2004
Standards Matter
This publication
missed me with its first two issues, but the third showed
up in Edu_RSS today and I'm glad it did, as it pointed me
to things like the new IMS RSS feed, the IEEE standard for runtime services
communication (in which I learn that IEEE calls Javascript
"ECMAScript" (for no good reason, so far as I can tell),
the Australia Research Repositaries Online to the World (ARROW) project, and much, much more. The
newsletter doesn't itself seem to have an RSS feed, but if
they keep announcing issues through EdNA's feed, I'll be
happy (not as happy as I could be, but happy). By Various
Authors, EdNA, March, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
What Is RSS-Blog-Furl High School
Missing?
Reacting to yesterday's visiopning
article by Will Richardson, Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School, the
Shifted Librarian comments, " the only time the library
shows up in Will's post is when the teacher unsubscribes
from the library's feed!" Quite right - and as she
accurately points out, library services may become obsolete
unless they make the shift from traditional place-based
resource collections to the sort of personalized online
data services people are going to want. By Jenny Levine,
The Shifted Librarian, March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper
Canada
As Michael Geist summarizes, "the court now appears to be
considering all copyright law interpretation through the
lens of balancing user rights with creators rights.” This
is an important ruling. Note this: "Under s. 29 of the
Copyright Act, fair dealing for the purpose of research or
private study does not infringe copyright. 'Research' must
be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to
ensure that users' rights are not unduly constrained, and
is not limited to non-commercial or private contexts."
That's what we like to see. By Supreme Court of Canada,
March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Where Are Open Source Course Management
Systems Being Used?
Good item by Scott Leslie as
he attempts to dispell the 'Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt' (FUD)
being spready about open source course management systems.
By Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do
to Survive
If you produce content of any type,
you need to read Vin Crosbie's (long awaited) advice to the
newspaper industry: "For its survival, the newspaper
industry must produce and automatically deliver, wired and
wirelessly, entirely intact and individually customized
editions that are smaller, vertically formatted, and that
combine the graphical layout capabilities of print and the
interactive multimedia capabilities of the Web, and flow to
fit any display screen or printed paper size." There's a
lot more in this article, but the essence is clear:
personalize or die. Don't forget to look at the rest of
OJR's Future of News coverage as well. By Vin
Crosbie, Online Journalism Review, March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
ICQ Builds a Social Network
An
interesting twist to the social networking software story
unfolds today as ICQ launches an a social networking site.
Yes, ICQ, the instant messaging program now owned by
America Online. "Dubbed ICQ Universe, the new service banks
on the growing popularity of social networking with hopes
of leveraging the ICQ network's 175 million subscribers."
And as ICQ representatives say, "To a certain extent ICQ
was already a social network so it's not like we had to
start from scratch ... this is a natural extension for us."
By Scarlet Pruitt, PC World, March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Email 'Leak' Suggests SCO Got up to $100m
From MS
There are reverberations through the open source
community today as a website prints what it suggests is a
"leaked memo" showing that Microsoft put
up $100 million to help SCO pursue its lawsuits and
undermine Linux. If there is anything to this, it would
mean that Microsoft is up to its ears in the 'dirty tricks'
department. Meanwhile, SCO's lawsuits - most recently
against high profile Linux users AutoZone and
DaimlerChrysler - are costing much more than they're
earning, leading some to say the company is doing everything wrong. By John Lettice, The
Register, March 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Why Engage in E-science?
This is
about right: "there is a revolution going on - the
democratisation of science." This article looks at this
from the point of view of librarians. The revolution is
that one person uses another prson's data. But there is a
lot of data, and it's constantly changing. The librarian's
challenge is to enable access to this data. "Soon the
volume of data in scientific data archives will 'vastly'
exceed the information - journal articles etc - in current
commercial databases." By Anonymous, Update, March, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
An Introduction to Personas and How to Create
Them
The purpose of a persona is to create
testing scenarios for software. The idea is to take
research beyond market segments and to create a
whole person out of the 'two and a half children'. For my
part, I think that personas could be useful for much more
than market research. I think a persona would be a great
teaching tool. By Tina Calabria, Step Two Designs, March,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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