Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
January 15, 2008

Free MIT Online Courses Getting a Million Hits Per Month
Bandwidth is very slow this morning in Kuala Lumpur so I'll keep today's edition short. According to a CBC report OCW is getting a milliin hits a month. Although 'a million hits' sounds like a lot, this works out to roughly 33,000 hits a day. That's not a lot for a large website. OCW has 2000 courses online, which means, on average, each course is hit 15 times a day. One person could do that by browsing a few pages! To put it into perspective, when my Referrer System was at its peak, it was getting 800,000 hits a day. Since I know the MIT Open Courseware site is popular, my first instinct is to question the statistic. Richard Nantel, Brandon hall Research January 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Social Networking in Education
This article consists mostly of links to other websites, but it is a comprehensive and useful overview of the use of Ning, a social networking tool, in education. Steve Hargadon, Infinite Thinking Machine January 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Networks] [Comment]

Blackboard and The NTI Group Join Forces
Blackboard is moving into the mobile phone notifications business, signing an agreement to acquire The NTI Group, which is involved in the mass alert and notification service industry. Michael Chasen, Blackboard Educate Innovate January 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Blackboard Inc.] [Comment]

Reflection On Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman'S Keynote On More Than Cool Tools (K12Online07)
Review of a presentation from the Three Amigos. "This is an amazing -and very intense- presentation. On the supporting wiki, the authors do admit that they are 'guilty as charged for presenting [tools] to teachers via the firehose effect.' This is perhaps not as extreme as that, but I wouldn't share this with your 'newbie' teachers. Their heads might explode." Bob Sprankle, Bit By Bit January 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

We'Re Watching You
I think this is an accurate prediction: "Ars Technica says that 2008 could be the Year of Filtering. 'DRM on music may be dying, but network filtering of copyrighted material is alive and well. In fact, over the next few months, two different filtering initiatives from Big Content could both come to fruition, bringing the magic of Big Brother to colleges and ISPs near you.'" Tim Stahmer, Associated press, ABC News January 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Digital Rights Management (DRM), Networks, Copyrights, Patents] [Comment]

 

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