Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
March 11, 2010

Mistakes I have made building web applications
As son as I saw the first web application building 'mistake' I knew I should link to this post. The mistake? "Not thinking about character encoding right from the start." All I can say is, ack! ack! ack! (I hate character encoding issues). Another good one is number 10: "Underestimating the problem of spam." Juliette Culver, Weblog, March 11, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Spam] [Comment] [Tweet]

Moodle: Frankenstein or Franken-steen?
Antonio (no last name on this blog) offers a responds and reframing of recent criticisms of Moodle. He's concerned abut the critics implicitly helping competitors, like Blackboard. And the criticisms, he says, miss the point. "It's not Moodle which cost 6 million British Pounds. Moodle was free, had they deemed to stick just with it. Then, I have no clear info that the OU has repented its decision." Antonio, Skate of the Web, March 11, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Great Britain, Blackboard Inc., Web Logs] [Comment] [Tweet]

Creative Commons licenses on Flickr: many more images, slightly more freedom
Keeping you up to date: there are now 135 million Creative Commons licensed images in Flickr. Of these, the large majority (73 percent) have a Creative Commons 'non-commercial' license (CC-NC). Interestingly, there's a clear bias in this post for non-CC-NC licenses - a so-called "freedom score" increases the fgewer CC-NC licenses there are. I'll say it again: a resource is MORE FREE if it is NOT sold commercially, because the owners of these resources won't let you have them unless you pay them money. It is an Orwellian turn of phrase that allows you to portray as "more free" resources that you have to pay for. Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons, March 11, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Flickr] [Comment] [Tweet]

Microsoft issues vouchers for online training
One would think that organizations and companies that support vouchers would use them themselves, instead of relying, as they all do, on directed or in-house training. Until now, looking for a company that actually did this would be futile. But according to this article, Microsoft is offering free online learning to customers in the form of vouchers. This program, offering 18,500 vouchers, is a very small-scale experiment in the system. But it will be interesting to see how the pilot works. If so, it could then be scaled to serve the corporate community generally. It would be good to have a working example of such a program before converting the entire public education system to it, as voucher advocates urge.
Tom Abate, San Francisco Chonicle, March 11, 2010 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Microsoft] [Comment] [Tweet]

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