LEARNING STANDARDS
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ACADEMIC ADL CO-LAB OFFERS SELF TUTORIAL FOR E-LEARNING
A University of Wisconsin System initiative has created an online self-tutorial for academic, business, industry, or government professionals interested in understanding more about standards in e-learning. The self-tutorial is available at no cost through the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Laboratory, which is working on interoperability standards that will help colleges and universities nationwide store, deliver, and access online learning materials.
http://www.wisconsin.edu/news/2002/r021203.htm
 
ADL RELEASES NEW IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE, CONFORMANCE TEST SUITE FOR ALMOST FINAL VERSION 1.3 OF SCORM
Just ahead of the forthcoming plugfest, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) released a new implementation guide of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), as well as an updated conformance test suite for self-testing content and systems. All of these are for version 1.2; 1.3 is edging closer to 'final' status with a new working draft.
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20021202160428
 
STANDARDS MATTER
Why Standards Matter, a free e-learning course that introduces the basics of the voluntary standardization process, is now available from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a non-profit organization that administers the U.S. voluntary standardization system.
http://www.standardslearn.org
 
 
EDUCATION NEWS
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ACADEMIC PUBLISHING IN THE DIGITAL REALM: AN INTERVIEW WITH CLIFFORD LYNCH
Our topic today, electronic publishing, covers a lot of territory. What are the parameters of electronic publishing in higher education—from a very high-level perspective?
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6983
 
VIRTUAL MEDICAL SCHOOL MAY BECOME A REALITY
Proponents see the project as a blending of e-learning and clinical training; detractors worry that development of interpersonal skills will be forfeited.
http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/amnews/pick_02/prsa1202.htm
 
ED FLOATS PLAN TO EVALUATE EDUCATION RESEARCH
The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) newly formed Institute of Education Sciences has released the first draft of its plan to evaluate research as part of its web-based What Works Clearinghouse project. The Clearinghouse, founded in August, aims to become a trusted, one-stop source of scientifically proven teaching practices for educators, policy makers, and the public. It will contain systematically evaluated research to help educators more easily identify scientifically proven teaching methods as required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryalert.cfm?ArticleID=4110
 
THE ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO BOOM: WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?
The term "electronic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. We often hear it associated with assessment, but also with accreditation, reflection, student resumes, and career tracking. It's as if this new tool is the answer to all the questions we didn't realize we were asking. A portfolio, electronic or paper, is simply an organized collection of completed work. Art students have built portfolios for decades.
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6984
 
WEB SITE ALLOWS UWM STUDENTS TO POST REVIEWS 
Some professors worry that courses promising easy As may soon be easier to find at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A new online system, purchased by the Student Association at UWM, will give students access to the grading histories of professors--including the number of As, Bs and Cs they gave students the previous semester. The move has sparked a debate across campus about the potential for grade inflation and what some professors worry is a "consumer-driven" approach to education.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/dec02/100483.asp
 
STUDENTS LEARNING TO EVADE MOVES TO PROTECT MEDIA FILES
As colleges across the country seek to stem the torrent of unauthorized digital media files flowing across their campus computer networks, students are devising increasingly sophisticated countermeasures to protect their free supply of copyrighted entertainment. Most colleges have no plans to emulate the Naval Academy, which last week confiscated computers from about 100 students who are suspected of having downloaded unauthorized copies of music and movie files. But many are imposing a combination of new technologies and new policies in an effort to rein in the rampant copying. (Registration required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/technology/27SWAP.html
 
AUST E-LEARNING SPECIALIST SCORES BIG UK DEAL 
An Australian e-learning software company has built a major assessment and testing system for the United Kingdom-based eUniversities Worldwide. UK eUniversities Worldwide (UKeU) is the government-backed online learning site for all UK universities and colleges. The site will go live in 2003, and aims to have one million students by its tenth year of operation. UKeU is looking for the best-of-breed programs in several areas, with plans to join them together in a modular format.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/0,2000024981,20270282,00.htm
 
 
TECHNOLOGY NEWS
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AT&T, IBM, INTEL FOUND NATIONWIDE WI-FI NETWORK VENTURE
Executives from AT&T Business Services, IBM Global Services, and Intel Capital Investments formally launched a jointly owned company called Cometa Networks, with the intention of building the largest nationwide Wi-Fi network.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/12/05/021205hncometa.xml
 
TABLET PCS STAKE OUT HIGHER ED
The new Tablet PCs from Microsoft and a host of PC manufacturers were announced last month with the usual coast-to-coast fanfare as the next big thing in personal computing. And while that is always the hope and the hype in such smash announcements, for the higher education community, it just might be true.
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6985
 
MIKE LANGBERG: BOLD TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS FOR 2012
Smart devices that talk to each other without human intervention, store merchandise that rings itself up for purchase and machines that finally understand the spoken word are just some of the new technologies awaiting us in the year 2012.  I gave myself a ``B'' for my 1992 predictions of what life would be like in 2002. Before sticking my neck out another 10 years, I consulted three Silicon Valley futurists: Tim Bajarin, president of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies in Campbell; Tim Brown, president of Palo Alto design firm Ideo; and Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/business/4635704.htm
 
LOVE TO SCRIBBLE? TRY LOGITECH'S IO PEN
If all of the recent coverage of tablet PCs has piqued your curiosity about pen input, but not enough to drop $2,000 on a new PC, you now have a far more affordable alternative: Logitech's $199 io digital pen. Unlike tablet PCs, which allow you to write digital ink directly onto an LCD display, you use the io on paper--albeit special, high-tech paper (available in a variety of forms, including Post-It notes and a specialized notebook from Mead) with an invisible grid of dots embedded on its surface.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2899261,00.html
 
SONY DUMPS MICROSOFT FOR STAROFFICE
By the end of the year, Sony will include version 6.0 of StarOffice on most consumer desktop PCs sold in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, according to Sun. Microsoft's Works package is currently used on most of those PCs. The deal makes Sony the first top-tier PC maker to use StarOffice and marks another dent in Microsoft's dominance of office applications, a market led by Works and its more expensive business-oriented sibling, Microsoft Office.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-976239.html
 
FORBIDDEN WINDOWS: AN EARLY LOOK AT LONGHORN ALPHA
ExtremeTech has obtained a look at alpha version 3683 of the Windows Longhorn operating system, and has found that there have been minimal changes at this stage with a heavy focus on user interface change. Longhorn is the code-name for the next desktop version of Windows, and is rumored to be due out in late 2004 or early 2005. This version includes a rough new Visual Style called "Plex"
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,729317,00.asp
 
LINUX 2.6 ON HORIZON
The next major release of the Linux kernel is on track for the first half of next year, with improvements in its ability to handle large amounts of memory and throughput. Scalability enhancements, as well, will add to the appeal of the latest kernel, Version 2.6, for enterprise customers, according to Linus Torvalds, the creator and top programmer for the Linux kernel, in an e-mail exchange with eWeek.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,723328,00.asp
 
NEXT MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM WILL BE RADICAL CHANGE FROM XP
Windows XP has been on the market for a year now, so naturally everyone is clamoring for details on the next version of the world's most popular operating system--or so Microsoft Corp. hopes. Details are dribbling out, but Microsoft won't say a word on the record, declining to comment for this story. Analysts and software developers haven't been briefed, either. But here's what has leaked out so far.
http://www.msnbc.com/local/pisea/97709.asp
 
WATCH OUT FOR WINEVAR THE WORM
A period of comparative virus-free peace may be over with news of a potentially destructive new worm. Trend Micro has warned that 'Winevar' targets Windows systems and has the potential to delete files.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1137191
 
SOFTWARE AIMS TO PUT YOUR LIFE ON A DISK
Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write--in fact your every memory and experience--into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything, New Scientist reveal. It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993084
 
BUSH SIGNS $900 MILLION CYBERSECURITY ACT
President Bush signed legislation dedicating more than $900 million over five years to security research and education to protect the nation's technology infrastructure against hackers and terrorists. The Cyber Security Research and Development Act will establish computer security research centers and fellowship programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47264-2002Nov27.html
 
 
INTERNET RELATED NEWS
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DAN GILLMOR: COPYRIGHT CARTEL STILL WINNING MOST OF THE TIME
As the war over "intellectual property" spreads to new legal fronts, the copyright cartel and its allies are winning most of the battles. Here and there, however, we can find glimmers of hope. The courts have not been supplying much help so far. Judges mostly continue to ignore free speech and customers' rights as they uphold laws giving copyright holders--especially the entertainment industry--absolute control over digital information and the devices that can display or copy it.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4641661.htm
 
WAITING ON A WIRELESS NET
The nation’s half-dozen or so wireless titans have spent years developing “third-generation” networks, capable of zapping data to your hand-held device at broadband speeds. But billions of dollars into the upgrades, the wireless companies’ 3G efforts seldom top the performance of dial-up modems.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/844091.asp
 
WEB APPS BECOME NEW WEAKEST SECURITY LINK
The defensive perimeter of firewalls and intrusion-detection systems that most companies rely on for network security is being bypassed by hackers who have made Web applications their newest targets, security experts warned. "Perimeter defense is becoming an irrelevant term," said Kevin Soo Hoo, senior security architect at Cambridge, Mass.-based security consultancy @Stake Inc. "The emphasis [in hacking] is now shifting to the application layer. The Web application is becoming the primary vehicle for attack."
http://computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,76309,00.html
 
MICROSOFT: IE HOLE WORSE THAN REPORTED
Microsoft raised its threat rating for a security flaw in its Internet Explorer browser to "critical," in response to criticism of its initial assessment of the hole's danger.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-976440.html
 
AN INSIDE LOOK AT CHINA FILTERS
Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman -- the Harvard Law School researchers who detailed the Saudi government's Internet filtering -- have produced the first comprehensive, empirical look at China's blocking policy. As expected, pro-democracy, Taiwanese and Tibetan sites are strictly off-limits to Chinese Internet users. So are health sites, Web pages from U.S. universities, online comic books and science-fiction fan centers and the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg's Internet home. "We found blocking of almost every kind of content," Edelman said. "If it exists, China blocks at least some of it."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56699,00.html
 
THE ART OF BLOGGING - PART 1
The Internet is still in the embryonic stages of standing on its own characteristics. Communication and content presentation strategies still mirror existing models, particularly newspaper and magazine publishing.  Email, for example, is merely an extension of existing mail systems. As such, it is about bending a new medium to an existing process. Blogging is using a new medium for what it is good for--connecting and interacting. Blogging is a first generation tool built on, and taking advantage of, the unique attributes of the Internet.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm
 
THE ART OF BLOGGING - PART 2
Getting Started, "How To", Tools, Resources
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_2.htm
 
REALNETWORKS AND STARZ TO OFFER MOVIES OVER INTERNET
RealNetworks Inc. and cable movie channel company Starz Encore Group are teaming up to offer movie subscriptions over the Internet. The new service, to be launched in spring 2003, will give subscribers with high-speed Internet connections access to more than 100 movies a month at the same time they are available on Starz' cable channels. Users can download and watch the movies at any time within a limited period, typically as long as they were showing on Starz' cable channels.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4661968.htm
 
EGYPT AIMS TO ENTER INTERNET AGE IN ONE BIG STEP 
The new library of Alexandria features recently unearthed antiquities, priceless Middle Eastern manuscripts and rare maps. But the highlight of Egypt's modern-day revival of the legendary center of classical learning is not an ancient artifact or even a book. Prominently displayed in a glass-encased room near the library's entrance are 200 Hewlett-Packard PCs containing copies of nearly every public Web page posted since 1996.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4641662.htm
 
SMART EMAIL ADDRESSES COULD SLICE SPAM
Software that generates a unique email address for every message sent could help cut down spam, a US computer scientist believes. This is because hidden in the address are encrypted rules determining who is permitted to reply to the address, as well as how many replies can be sent and when.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993152
 
U.S. COLLEGES PLAY INTERNET TRAFFIC COP
If budget cuts and new red tape regarding foreign student visas didn’t give state and private universities enough to worry about, modern technology is causing them still more grief. Their high tech headache comes from students using campus computers to illegally download music, movies, games and software.
http://www.stateline.org/story.do?storyId=273725
 
ISP DOWNLOAD CAPS TO SLOW SWAPPING?
High-speed Internet service providers are considering adopting new pricing plans that if widely adopted could take a bite out of file swapping. For the past few years, many broadband ISPs have been frank in saying that file-swapping services such as Napster and Kazaa have been among the most popular activities on their networks. This has led to a small proportion of dedicated file swappers, known as "bandwidth hogs" within the industry, who account for a hugely disproportionate amount of network traffic.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975320.html
 
EFFORTS TO STOP MUSIC PIRACY 'POINTLESS'
Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work. So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft. The four researchers believe that the steady spread of file-swapping systems and improvements in their organisation will eventually make them impossible to shut down.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2502399.stm
 
COMPUTER VIRUSES FACE SLOW DOWN
Computer viruses could, in the future, find it much harder to spread themselves over the internet. Matthew Williamson, a researcher at the Hewlett-Packard laboratories in Bristol, UK, has come up with a way to slow down the rate of infection. It works by limiting the number of connections at any one time from an infected computer. This has the effect of throttling the spread of the virus, giving technicians time to spot and eliminate the bug.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2511961.stm
 
 
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[NOTE: The selections above are from the Academic ADL Co-Lab News Report, a limited-distribution, weekly executive summary of trends, strategies, and innovations influencing the future of learning and technology in higher education. It is prepared by the University of Wisconsin System Office of Learning and Information Technology (OLIT) in coordination with the Co-Lab. Collegebuys.org is using these selections with permission. The selections from the weekly summaries were selected and edited by David Stuart of collegebuys.org.]
 
[NOTE: This information is provided for information purposes only. Mention or discussion of a product, company, or person does not represent any official endorsement or criticism of the same. All authors and organizations retain complete copyright.]
 
[SOURCE MATERIAL: The reference as specific as possible is provided to a source for each summary. When using an online link, ensure the URL has not been broken with a carriage return.]
 
[ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Judy Brown is the Emerging Technology Analyst for the University of Wisconsin System, OLIT. Brown conducts research and consults for the 15-institution UW System. She is Director of the Academic ADL Co-Laboratory at The Pyle Center in Madison, WI. Until recently she coordinated the WTCS Hardware and Software Purchasing Consortium and other statewide technology initiatives for 16 technical college districts comprised of 47 campuses. Brown was named one of the Top 100 women in computing by McGraw Hill's Open Computing magazine (December 1994). She writes a business technology column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is the coordinator of eWEEK's Corporate Partner Program.]
 
[COMMENTS & CONTRIBUTIONS: If you want to offer material, or if you want to comment on the contents, contact Judy Brown at judy@academiccolab.org