Never one to leave things alone, I present you with the new-look OLDaily. What you should notice is that it looks a lot like the old-look OLDaily except that it's a bit cleaner, easier to read, and fits into your screen better. Unless you're reading the text version, in which case you should see no change at all. I hope you enjoy the new look.

Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq It's a few weeks old, but take the fifteen minutes or so it takes to read this six page article. Ignore the title: it's mostly the story of Marcus, the 15 year old who became a legal expert on AskMe.Com. Reflect: what does this say about how the internet changes our perception of education? Of credentials. Consider: "By its nature, the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information. The Internet was merely using Marcus to tell us something about ourselves: we doubted the value of formal training. A general collapse in the importance of formal training was a symptom of post-Internet life; knowledge, like the clothing that went with it, was being informalized." By Michael Lewis, the New York Times, July 15, 2001. [Refer]

Web Course Usability Reasonably good article, based largely on Jacob Nielsen, on improving usability in web based courses. By Dave Smulders, Learning Circuits, August, 2001. [Refer]

Training E-Trainers Told mainly in the form of stories about how people learning to teach online, this article covers some of the important lessons online teachers can learn and how to teach them so they are passed on to new teachers before they start their first online course. By Karen Frankola, Learning Circuits, August, 2001. [Refer]

Porn is Hot Course on Campus You have to figure this is a subject ripe for conversion into an online learning format: some university professors argue that pornography should be a legitimate field of academic study. "To not study pornography is to ignore an absolutely pervasive phenomenon in our culture," said Linda Williams, a film studies professor at the University of California in Berkeley. By David Abel, Boston Globe, August 20, 2001. [Refer]

Textbook Cases of Bankruptcy How online textbook companies and university bookstores reacted to the tech crash - and to each other. Quick read with some good links. By Katie Dean , Wired News, August 21, 2001. [Refer]

Penguin Embraces eBooks Penguin jumps into the eBook market with a wide variety of titles, especially the classics. The publisher will use the Adobe and Microsoft eBook readers. No word yet on pricing; Penguin's eBook website is currently very barren. By Kieren McCarthy, The Register, August 21, 2001. [Refer]

Alberta Learning RFPs The deadline is ten days away, so if you produce learning objects, you can still get your bid in. No matter what your role, though, you should take a look at these RFPs as an example of what is expected of at least one set of government sponsored learning objects to be used across the entire province. Fascinating. [Refer]

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