By Stephen Downes
April 15, 2003
Blackboard Responds to Criticism of Interz0ne
Lawsuit
In the wake of widespread and mostly bad
publicity after it blocked two students from giving a
presentation, Blackboard has responded with official
silence (nothing on their website or in the press release
news wires). But in a message to the BLKBRD-L Blackboard's
David Yaskin posted a terse response to some of the
criticisms. According to Yaskin, someone (presumably the
students) was "working for a competitor" and deliberately
accessed the system in order to "falsify security events
and financial transactions." By Anonymous, PoliTechBot,
April 15, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Teachers Teach The Techies
An
interesting discussion ensues as a forum on learning
technologies is launched by CETIS. For example, "as many
participants pointed out, the only way in which all subject
communities will be catered for properly, may be to forget
about monolithic VLEs, and move to collections of
specialised tools that do one or two things really well."
Comments aren't posted yet, but should be shortly at the Pegadogy Forum website. In the meantime,
there is this useful article to draw from. By Wilbert
Kraan, CETIS, April 15, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
CyberBullying
The creator of
bullying.org, a website devoted to the issue of bullies in
schools, has launched a new site devoted to the online
variety of bullying. As posted in the announcement to
wwwedu: "Cyberbullying involves the use of information and
communication technologies such as e-mail, cell phone and
pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal
Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web
sites, to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile
behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to
harm others." By Bill Belsey, April 15, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
New German Copyright Law Pleases Scholars and
Angers Academic Publishers
If the new law angers
publishers, then (these days at least) it pleases
educators. This seems to be the case for a new German law
that "gives universities and research institutions
considerable leeway to digitally distribute copyrighted
materials among students and scholars without paying extra
charges." Though welcomed by academics, the publishers say
they will fight the law and that it will force them out of
business. Maybe so: or maybe they should be revising their
business models for the information age. By Burton Bollag,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Seb's "Weblogs and Knowledge Sharing" Survey:
Results
In a nutshell: those who use weblogs,
use them a lot. Statistically this survey probably isn't
especially relevant, since the respondants, self-selected,
are almost all regular weblog users (which would be how
they found out about the survey). But it's an interesting
snapshot of the dynamics developing in this community. By
Sébastien Paquet, Seb's Open Mind, January, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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