By Stephen Downes
September 8, 2003
The State of the E-Learning
Market
We are well into the e-learning doldrums,
writes the author, but the depressed market and
consolidations (and failures) mean it's easier to pick
between solutions. All true, but this article suggests to
me that we are still in one of the early stages of the
doldrums: denial. Consider this snippet: "The reason had
nothing to do with technology. Managers just didn't
motivate learners to take the e-course. Managers who took
simple steps—merely tracking attendance, for example—saw
higher completion rates." See? It's not the technology's
fault, it's the customer's! Nope, sorry, won't fly. By Marc
Hequet , Trainingmag, September 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Leveraging Mobile and Wireless Internet
Good overview of the trend toward the use of
mobile and wireless devices in learning, along with a set
of changes developers should expect as a result of this
trend. The major changes involve a conversion from
'set-piece' learning to performance support and workflow.
By Harvey Singh, Learning Circuits, September 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free
Content
In this article sure to make the rounds,
Clay Shirkey has two major points to make. First, he argues
that a micropayment system for online content will never
work because of "mental transaction costs," the hestitation
caused by considering whether it's worth half a cent to
read an article. And second, he argues that while "fame and
fortune" traditionally went together, in today's publishing
environment artists increasingly face a choice between the
two, as free publishing offers fame without the fortune.
The latter point is probably correct, but the former is
not. If mental transaction costs are a barrier, then a
successful micropayment system will transcend that barrier
by creating a system that automates such minor
transactions. This, of course, requires trust in the
mechanism. But who trusts vendor-controlled payment
systems? Not me. By Clay Shirkey, Clay Shirky's Writings
About the Internet, September 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Reed Elsevier Interim Results
2003
From the Open Access News, Peter Suber writes,
"Elsevier has put some PowerPoint slides on the web
summarizing its interim results for 2003. Slide #16 shows
that there were 4.5 million full-text articles in
ScienceDirect on June 30, 2003, and slide #15 shows that
there were 124 million article downloads in the 12 months
preceding that date. This means that its articles were
downloaded an average of 28 times each during the past
year. For comparison I asked Jan Velterop of BioMed Central
what the download figure was for BMC articles during the
same time period. He reports that the average is about 2500
per year, which doesn't count downloads of the same
articles from PubMed Central. This is 89 times the Elsevier
number. (PS: On another subject, note that slide #5 shows
that Elsevier's revenues and profits are both up, when
expressed in pounds, but both down in Euros.)" PowerPoint
slides. By Unknown, Reed Elsevier, September, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Purposely Dumbing Down and Mythic
Education?
Perhaps prompted by the flurry of
back-to-school articles, there has been a renewed interest
in the concept of the dumbing-down of education (or
whatever you want to call it). This link is to a nice set
of background resources, including works by Illich and
Dewey. John Hibbs pointed readers to Harper's September feature article,
'Against School', by John Taylor Gatto (not online yet).
Steve Giesel linked to Gatto's book, The Underground History of American
Education. By Timothy Takemoto, DEOS-L, September 4,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Preview of Next Release of
DSpace
Content archiving software development
continues to progress as a list of new features anticipated
in DSpace 1.2 is announced, including support for
sub-communities, delegated administration of communities
and collections, and items with METS metadata. Meanwhile, Fran�ois
Schiettecatte has announced that RSS feeds have been added
to the functionality of My.OAI. And a new version of Open Journal
Systems was release August 23. By Richard Rodgers,
Dspace-general, September 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
SCORM Resources
A poster on the
ITForum asked for resources about SCORM and the results
have flooded in. From Peter Hope came Dr. Ed's SCORM Course and Carnegie
Mellon's Learning Systems Architecture Lab, which
contains developer guides, workshops and numerous links.
George Free offered up CETIS and Lewis Erskine weighed in with
ADLnet, IMS Content Developers Guides and SCORM Best Practices Guide for Content
Developers. By Various Authors, September, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Inside Baseball: The RSS
Backlash
It was predictable, it was inevitable,
and it has arrived: the backlash against RSS and against
blogging in general. This article surveys the discussion
and offers several links to backlash-type pages. Even more
amusing is another link, this to a series of PowerPoint
slides titled Don't Blog: Headlines from the Future.
None of this really matters, of course: bloggers will
continue to blog and RSS will continue to syndicate, and
the world will continue in much the way it should. By Mark
Jones, InfoWorld TechWatch, September 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Paradigma Web Harvesting
Environment
Overview of an architecture for a
document harvesting system. This paper is a good
description of such systems and provides a good vocabulary.
My favorite section is the one on 'possible problems with
web pages' - from where I sit, there is no 'possible' about
it; I have encountered every one of these problems with my
own harvester. By Ketil Albertsen, ECDL Workshop on Web
Archives, August 21, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Identification of Network Accessible
Documents: Problem Areas and Suggested
Solutions
Document identification may seem like
a no-brainer - just give each document a unique number,
right? But because documents have multiple versions,
because some versions develop in parallel, because
documents disappear, because documents are composed of
multiple parts, and because the document presented may be
only a representation of a document stored, document
identification becomes tricky. This paper is a good survey
of the issues and proposes that something like DOI be
adopted. PDF. By Carol van Nuys and Ketil Albertsen, ECDL
Workshop on Web Archives, August 21, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Academic Industrial
Complex
Good article documenting the conversion
of academia into a profit center, a theme familiar to
readers of these pages. "Market. Consumers. Branding. That
we take for granted that higher education is a business is
a huge step toward the marketization of higher education."
One nice thing about this article is that it draws a clear
dark line between the growing commercialism of academia and
its continuing retreat from the principles of public
education. "It's a disincentive to create economic
diversity. It tends to create a very self-reverential
notion of higher education and to destroy efforts on
broader social issues on which higher education should
provide leadership." By Felicia R. Lee, New York Times,
September 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Lawmakers to Weigh Database Protection
Bill
Though it has long been held that data -
such as lists of addresses, court proceedings, or
professional directories - cannot be copyrighted, proposed
new legislation will keep this information off-limits to
those who wish to publish it. All part of the enormous
extension of copyright protections currently turning the
public domain into private property. The ALA provides more
background. By Andy Sullivan, Yahoo!
News, September 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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