By Stephen Downes
August 9, 2004
China - Traditional Music Sound
Archives
This is the sort of thing I would much
rather be covering in these pages: the UNESCO project
digitizing (and hence preserving for all of humanity)
traditional Chinese music has concluded. Clips are
available on this website. Or this item: Lewis Carroll's Scrapbook, digitized and
placed online by the Library of Congress. Beautiful. By
Various Authors, UNESCO, July 29, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Freedom in Learning
Innovations
Elliott Masie has caused a flap in
the e-learning world by sending a letter attacking the
patent litigation campaign launched by iplearn, "a company with no products and
a patent attorney." OLDaily readers will be familiar with
iplearn; as reported here, the company has convinced
various e-learning companies to settle rather than fight,
including Saba, Skillsoft and Digital Think. Such settlements help no
one; while they confer a short term advantage to the LMS
company, they simply give iplearn money to pursue its case
and they encourage other companies - such as Acacia, which is sending letters to
colleges and universities demanding royalties for streaming
media - incentive to continue. The education sector as a
whole is weak with respect to its ability to defend against
such frivolous lawsuits, and when companies that should not
cave do so it hurts the sector as a whole. So the best of
luck to Masie, I say, join us in the fray, late but not
unwelcome. By Michelle Lentz Gerl, Write Technology, August
7, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Reed Elsevier Chief Hits Back in Scientific
Publishing Row
Reed Elsevier is hitting back
against the open access publishing model. In this item,
company CEO Sir Crispin Davis notes that publisher content
continues to hold sway. “After five years, the author-pays
model has gained a 1 per cent market share. Libraries do
push back on costs, but we are securing a 96 per cent
renewal rate, and that tells the real story.” In another item he is quoted as calling
"'daft' the idea that British universities should have to
make publicly funded research freely available to all." In
a third article, the CEO finds himself defending Reed
Elsevier's record profits. The CEO, who has
apparently never heard of Google, argues, "Today, through
his laptop, a scientist can access 3.5 miles of research
articles and do in an hour what would have taken a week
before. That would not have happened if we hadn't been able
to invest and you didn't have a profitable industry. None
of it would have happened under author pays." All items via
Open Access News. By Dan Sabbagh, Times Online, August 6,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Devil You Don’t Know: The Unexpected
Future of Open Access
Laden with snide remarks
and innuendos, this article suggests that advocates of open
access are promoting a simplistic solution with no regard
to the long term consequences. The long term result of open
access journals, argues the author, will be an increase,
not a decrease, in the cost of scholarly publication. This
is because open access shifts spending decisions from
librarians to authors. "Authors, on the other hand, are
acting out of personal impulse. No holds are barred. First
they will pay for domain names and blogging software, then
for metatagging tools, then for linking networks, then for
annotation capability, and so on, ad infinitum. As the
number of services rises, the expenditures per publication
will rise. The total cost of research publications will
grow enormously, driven by the author side of the
equation." By Joseph J. Esposito, First Monday, August 2,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Learning Technology Newsletter
The
July 2004 issue of IETF's Learning Technology newsletter is
now available but published only in PDF, making it
impossible to link to specific articles. Some good reading
here, though: Steven C. Shaffer's An algorithm for
comparing labeled graphs suggests the possibility of
applying graph theory to semantical networks, something
someone with a lot of patience and a powerful computer
system should try one day. Also worth a read is Juha
Puustjärvi's Conceptual Representation of Learning
Objects. By Various Authors, IETF, July, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Protestant Majority Slips: A Sign of Things
to Come in the LMS Wars
In what must be the
oddest lede to ever mark an article on e-learning, this
author introduces the coming diversity in LMS solutions
available to colleges and universities by analogy with the
apparently increasing diversity of religion in the United
States. The emphasis of this post is to introduce Sakai, an open source LMS building on the
SCORM and OKI standards. The proliferation of alternative
LMSs, argues the author, serves to increase the importance
of standards in the learning community. Via ADL Co-Lab
news. By Rob Reynolds, Xplana Zine, August 6, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Assessing Understanding With
Multiple-Choice Questions
A couple of short
posts on writing multiple choice questions to evaluate not
just knowledge, but also understanding and evaluation. The
link to the second part is at the bottom of the first
page. By Ian Grove-Stephensen, Chalkface, August 10, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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