Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
December 12, 2002

5 Step Guide to Becoming a Content Provider in the JISC Information Environment This plan will work not only for JISC but for distributed learning object repository networks in general. The plan:

Expose metadata about your content - OAI and Z39.50
Share news/alerts using RSS
Become an OpenURL source
Become an OpenURL target
Use persistent URIs

Bundles? Publishing companies? Who needs all that? Just get your metadata out there and make sure it points to learning objects. The network does the rest.(Thanks to S.I.T. for the link) By Andy Powell, Ariadne, October 10, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Once and Future Bookseller The first think you'll notice in this argicle is a graph showing dramatically declining stock prices. The numbers are for Varisty Books, the online bookseller set up to compete with university bookstores. Call that Plan A. Now scrap it. "Perhaps the only things that have changed more for the online bookseller are its reputation, its business models, and its fortunes... Its sales pitch to colleges, in a nutshell: Selling textbooks, with their typically low profit margins, is a hassle and often a financial drain, so why bother? Let Varsity handle all that." Instead of competing with university bookstores, Varisty Books aims to replace them. By Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Senate picks Pick-a-Prof More on the trend toward online professor evaluation services as students the University of North Dakota vote to license on-line teacher evaluation system Pick-a-Prof. It took quite a bit of doing, though, including four drafts of the agreement before Pick-a-Prof agreed that it would not send junk mail to students. By Brenden Timpe, Dakota Student, November, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Janes' Blogosphere This is an interesting idea, "a web-based microcontent aggregator for blogs (and soon newspapers) [that] displays all the current entries from the blogs listed in a reference blog's blogroll." What is interesting is that the concept is predicated on the fact that it takes too long to read blogs. Too long? By David Janes, November, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

ArtsJournal With a new look and a new approach, ArtsJournal relaunched this morning. "ArtsJournal is a weekday digest of some of the best arts and cultural journalism in the English-speaking world. Each day Arts Journal combs through more than 200 English-language newspapers, magazines and publications featuring writing about arts and culture." By Various Authors, November, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Online-Lab Software Simulates Chemical Interactions -- and Explosions Nice little story about Brian F. Woodfield, an assistant professor of chemistry at Brigham Young University who developed a simulated chemistry lab for use over the internet. By Dan Carnevale, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 10, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter?

Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/subscribe.cgi

[ About This NewsLetter] [ OLDaily Archives] [ Send me your comments]