OLDaily By Stephen Downes April 26, 2004 Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet) Interesting article surveying the first decade or so of information technology in the classroom. The authors look for the reason it hasn't really taken off yet, and find their answer in motivations: people who thrived in the type and paper era have no real incentive to change. And "yet their students are changing before their very eyes. A new book on the future of the public university puts it well: 'The traditional classroom paradigm is...being challenged by digital technology, driven not so much by the faculty, who have by and large optimized their teaching effort and their time commitments to a lecture format, but by students.'" By Edward L. Ayers and Charles M. Grisham, Virginia.edu, Spring, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Darwin Information Typing Architecture From the website: "OASIS Sponsor Members Arbortext, IBM, Innodata Isogen, and Nokia have proposed a new OASIS DITA Technical Committee for development and maintenance of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)... DITA is an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains based on existing types and domains." By Various Authors, OASIS, March 29, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Exports Surge for Education Nation Australia's investment in e-learning is beginning to be seen to pay off, as this article in the Sydney Morning Herald indicates. Check this out: "ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake said education exports were now worth more to Australia's balance of payments than traditional earners such as wool." Worth more than wool? By Linda Doherty, Sydney Morning Herald, April 22, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Learning Objects in an E-Learning Context I can't read PDF files at this CyberCafe, but ADL's description sounds interesting: :With vigorous development of the Internet, e-learning system has become more and more popular. ADL proposes SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) specification that an XML-based metadata with physical files had been explored by many studies since 1997. The issue of Special Theme on Learning Technology Newsletter aims to collect early research opinions and report the development from the Learning Objects (LOs) in an e-learning context. We received over 40 articles and chose 18 articles for publication. Those articles show a variety of flavors for future research." By Various Authors, IEEE, April, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Directions for ePortfolio Research E-Portfolios have been getting a fair amount of attention lately, especially with the recently completed conference on the subject in Vancouver. This page gets us started on e-portfolios by suggesting research questions from a number of different people. You can also read slides and papers from the recent AERA 2004 symposium. And for more on e-portfolios, have a look at the E-Port Consortium. By Various Authors, April, 2004 [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]