OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
July 11, 2005

The Economy of E-Learning
Something I wrote over the weekend on business models in e-learning. Economic opportunities will exist, not in the production of new goods that will not be purchased, but rather in the support and servicing of increasingly self-managed educational activity. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, July 10, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Correction - ALT-C
OK, a correction from last week. alt-i-lab is an annual "advanced learning technology interoperability" conference run by IMS. That's not the one I'm going to. No, I will be at ALT-C, the annual conference of the UK's Association for Learning Technology. If you want to know more about this year's conference in Manchester, here's the link. By Various Authors, July, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Sloan-C JobLine
Looking for work? Lauched Thursday, the Sloan Consortium's new job board advertises openings for online, distance and blended learning staff. You can view the positions advertised here. By Various Authors, July, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Learning in an Online World: Progess Report 2004
Overview report that concludes, essentially, that "Australian schools have continued to make progress in the use of ICT to improve student learning and to prepare children for the future." Statistics on bandwidth, internet use, embedding of ICT in the curriculum and teacher preparation. PDF. By Martyn Forrest, MCEETYA Information Communication Technologies in Schools Taskforce, July, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Open Access Archivangelism
This new blog evangelizes open access. By Stevan Harnad, July 9, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Arizona School Will Not Use Textbooks
Sign of the times. "A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans." By Associated Press, Yahoo! News, July 11, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Social Machines
Good article touching on many themes I've been addressing here and in my talks. The author brings together two important trends: first, the rise of social computing applications on the internet; and second, the arrival of ubiquitous computing in the form of wireless and mobile computing. "The new technologies also allow people to create more-detailed, true-to-life online identities." And more. By Wade Roush, TechnologyReview.com, August, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

"Building Open Source Communities" Presentations Go Live
More open source projects starting in our field all the time. And open source communities offer a good example for open educational content development. So this selection of presentations on the development of open source communities - using Apache, Moodle, and Sakai as examples, among others - should offer some insight. By Stuart Yeates, Open Source in Higher and Further Education, July 11, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Sakai 2.0 Review posted on Edutools site
Straightforward and neutral review of Sakai, an open source learning management system. It's interesting to compare Sakai with products like .LRN, Moodle and ATutor. By Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, July 7, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

ConceptTutor
Scott Leslie says of ConceptTutor that it "seems to be a glossary tool on steriods, with a structured approach to illustrating concepts and minimally assess the learner's understanding of those that can be used to annotate and supplement core course content." Source code is available here. By Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, July 8, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

PostgreSQL and XML updated
For those of us agonizing over how to deal with XML data and relational databases, this is welcome news. PostgreSQL is an open source database engine and its XML functions are useful indeed. Via D'Arcy Norman. By Tom Dyson, Throwing Beans, July 10, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Odeo Goes Live
Odeo is a new service for podcasting, allowing people to subscribe to podcasts, synch their MP3 player, add podcasting feeds and (eventually) create their own podcasts. OLDaily Audio is in there with 77 shows and 6 subscribers - but with no 'education' category, you'll never find it unless you're looking for it specifically. By Doug Kaye, Blogarithms, July 11, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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