Archives

China's Software Schools Evolve
China is embraking on a plan to dramatically expand its software development capacity with a plan to build 35 new software colleges. The schools, whic focus on practical experience and internships, are being developed with the cooperation of major software companies. More...

Weak Online Economics Threaten Quality of All Journalism, Pew Study Finds
A new report asserts that changes in journalism caused by the internet constitute "an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television." Readers are attracted to online news for three major reasons. More...

The Roboceptionist
Syllabus brings us this report about Valerie, the roboceptionist, at Carnegie Mellon, " one of the world's first robot receptionists. The school described the machine as 'a woman with lots of attitude and many stories to tell. More...

Superbloggers and the Future of Big Media
A panel at a media conference reports that newspapers, as we know them, are dead, and that television is not far behind. As the author of this article, blogged by George Siemens, notes, "While it might take some time for the TV to die, it's on the same path as the newspaper. The cause? News is free. The connection between the newspaper and TV models -- to the dot-coms that also provide free things supported by advertising -- is incredibly obvious." The future of journalism and of televsion is also the future of education. More...

Splashing in Ponds and Pools
Survey article about POOL, the peer to peer learning object sharing system. POOL becomes more important these days because of its affiliation with the eduSource porject. "Perhaps the most important lesson is that it is quite feasible to let informal P2P networks interoperate with more centralised and professionaly administered repositories, without all parts of the network having to talk the same protocol at all times for all purposes." eduSource, which will be staging an online launch event at the end of the month (full details in OLDaily tomorrow), connects with POOL as well as with more established institutional repositories. More...

Welcome to ...ReferralWeb
Nothing new under the sun. This is an interesting system, though I am didappointed not to have found my name among the 'trusted experts' that can be found. The idea is that the "system lets you search and explore social networks - the networks of friends, colleagues, and co-workers - that exist on the WWW. It lets you find trusted information from trusted experts, who are likely to help because they are friends of your friends!" There's a lot that's good about this system. More...

Yahoo vs Google
Now that Yahoo doesn't use Google as its search engine, the results have begun to diverge - leading to the usefulness of this comparison engine. Looking at the links, you can see the much greater influence of blogs on Google. More...

eScholars of the World, Unite! The University of California Revolutionizes Publishing Paradigm
The University of California is by no means the first to consider institutional e-prints archives (despite what the headline suggests) but its size makes it among the more important to do so. More...