California Virtual Campus

"Eben Moglen is a ‘dotCommunist’ rebel who has long advocated that all software should be free. So even he was surprised when his efforts recently won millions of dollars in support from IBM and other technology companies.

Mr. Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, is head of the new Software Freedom Law Center, formed in February. The center, supported by $4.2-million in seed money from a number of companies, will provide free legal help to nonprofit makers of open-source software. Such software is free for anyone to use and modify, providing they share their modifications with others.

As Mr. Moglen half-jokingly told one of his students, it seems like corporations are paying him "to make anarchism."

Then again, as Mr. Moglen has discovered, keeping open software free actually takes careful legal maneuvering.

Creators of open-source software seal their creations with licenses that dictate the terms of the software’s use and keep companies from swooping in and making it proprietary. Those licenses face increasing legal threats from commercial software makers that see open software encroaching on sales of their products. They want exclusive rights to distribute and modify the software they produce, and they regard it as both a nuisance and legally dubious that software that exploits even a tiny bit of licensed open-source software must, in many cases, itself remain free.

One of the Software Freedom Law Center’s goals will be to overcome those challenges, by enforcing and fine-tuning open licenses."

Read more: http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=i7f9t2r34×2yu9c8fpf4eyojhu7z1f2q

" The bosses of universities are increasingly hard to distinguish from the hard-headed managers of the corporate world. 
Acutely aware of the competition, they employ professional investors to manage their endownments, bid aggressively for the best professors and make every effort to publicise their student facilities.

It is not surprising, therefore, that leading universities have been increasingly keen to improve their productivity by using the internet.

Among the most successful companies set up to help them do so is Blackboard, a Washington-based business providing software that enables universities to create an on-line dimension to their courses.

A rare survivor of the dot.com bubble, Blackboard – which has a partnership with Pearson, owner of the Financial Times – allows college professors to put reading material and lecture notes on-line and to respond to student questions.

On the Blackboard system, students can register for courses from their computer, take tests and hand in homework on-line, set up discussion groups with their classmates and professor and watch videos.

"

Learn more: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6b9ea97e-979c-11d9-912c-00000e2511c8.html

"Faculty and instructional designers encounter problems when they try to adapt learning objects for delivery in their general education college-level distance courses that are intended for a military audience. One result is disappointment and frustration in those who believed in the promise of learning objects to save time, provide robust solutions with depth, high quality, and perfect interchangeability. It would be almost impossible to overstate the amount of hype that has gone into the subject of learning objects. The confusion is interesting because very few people agree on what a learning object is, and even fewer consistently use the same language to describe them."

Learn More: http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2005/03/the_problem_wit.php

"The next time you have a project in need of a software solution, try an experiment. Go to open-source collaboration site SourceForge and spend five minutes running a search. The odds are good that you’ll find an open-source project related to your problem. Free. No sales calls. No negotiations with vendors.

Granted, no service contracts or tech-support numbers either, most likely. But given the low barrier to entry, it’s easy to understand why thousands of companies are tempted to use open-source for, at the least, those projects that fall shy of the mission-critical line. And for those CIOs nervous about the support and licensing issues that surround open-source, well-known vendors are increasingly releasing some of their own code to the open-source community. IBM, for example, in January released 500 of its software patents to open-source software developers. Sun Microsystems Inc. has announced that it will release its Solaris operating system under an open-source license.

Of course, if you’re looking at open-source precisely because you want to get away from those very vendors, maybe there’s a better alternative: a cooperative of like-minded, open-source-loving CIOs just waiting for you to join. The options for using open-source have never been greater, and you owe it to yourself — and your company — to take a close look."

Read the full article: http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0,10801,100112,00.html

"Technology has great potential to expand and improve the ways people learn, yet eLearning has done little more than mimic earlier learning and teaching practices. Why isn’t technology living up to its tremendous potential? The answer may be, in part, that education has been treated as a market of learning rather than an environment for learning. Markets, and the commercial considerations at their base, are driven toward uniformity and reproducibility. Environments, structured with educational underpinnings, support diversity, a requirement for the experimentation needed to unlock the potential of eLearning."

Learn More: http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=10299&

Friday, February 25, 2005 by Yale Daily News — "Like many Yalies, Tyler Guth ‘08 and his peers in ‘Introductory Statistics’ do their homework together. But unlike the small groups that frequently gather at Au Bon Pain or Koffee Too?, Guth said virtually his entire class chats about their assignments without ever leaving their rooms.

Guth is one of nearly 100 Yale students currently registered on Sakai, an open-source computer program designed to offer a more streamlined and user-friendly version of the University’s classes server, Academic Media and Technology Director Charles Powell said Thursday."

Learn more: http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=28590

"The ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor nations is narrowing fast, according to a World Bank report. The World Bank questioned a United Nation’s campaign to increase usage and access to technology in poorer nations. ‘People in the developing world are getting more access at an incredible rate – far faster than… in the past,’ said the report. But a spokesman for the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society said the digital divide remained very real. ‘The digital divide is rapidly closing,’ the World Bank report said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4296919.stm

"A glance at the latest quarterly results and the development of the shares of those eLearning companies quoted on the NASDAQ manifests a situation between hope and fear. Saba and SumTotal Systems showed a positive tendency. Blackboard had good results, yet it still has to struggle with capricious shareholders. Centra’s yearly results were disappointing and additionally the company has not come up with a clear forecast for 2005. Skillsoft tumbled sharply.
"

http://www.checkpoint-elearning.de/index.php?co=1&aID=1201

"Thanks to the reach of the Internet, you can sit in your pajamas in Nashville, take a class from a professor in Johnson City and apply it toward a degree from the University of Memphis. But a state lawmaker says he is worried that colleges and universities in those three cities and others could be spending money developing the same online courses — negating the whole point of distance learning. Sen. David Fowler, R-Signal Mountain, is calling for a moratorium on the development of online classes until the state’s two higher education systems can show they’re able to prevent unnecessary duplication. In an online environment, only one school in the Tennessee Board of Regents system, for example, needs to offer American history, said Fowler, who recently filed a bill that would enforce the moratorium."

http://tennessean.com/education/archives/05/01/65267202.shtml