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Podcasting Gaining Steam in Higher Ed

Students in the designated classes subscribe to the lectures by going to the CSS Web site and copying a link into their iTunes or a similar program. After that, the program automatically picks up each lecture after it’s recorded. The student simply goes to his or her personal computer, opens iTunes and either listens to it there or transfers it to a portable MP3 player.

uwnews.org | University of Washington News and Information

Add U of Washington to the growing list of colleges and universities that are using podcasting as a tool for distributing course material to students.  It makes a lot of sense.  Here’s my question: what about law schools?  CALI is trying to provide law schools with tools to do this, but uptake seems to be limited.  I’m not sure why folks don’t want to try this technology now before they start getting battered by students and faculty who want it.  It is a bit frustrating.

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CALI Calls It Classcaster

The Chronicle has a great article (5 day link) on what it refers to as ‘coursecasting’. Those of you who have been following along will recognize many of the things mentioned in the article as central to the ideas that led us to develop Classcaster. With Classcaster, law faculty are able to try out podcasting right now without having to go through all the hassle usually associated with trying something new. All you need to do is log in, dial up, and podcast.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Lectures on the Go
More and more professors are turning to iPods and other digital audio devices to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling “coursecasting.” The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language.

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Minix 3 Released

Slashdot | Andy Tanenbaum Releases Minix 3
“MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. This new OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 4000 lines of executable code. The parts that run in user mode are divided into small modules, well insulated from one another. For example, each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process so a bug in a driver (by far the biggest source of bugs in any operating system), cannot bring down the entire OS.“

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XML Latest Front in Software Patent War

This stuff never seems to stop. I find it hard to beleive that IBM or Microsoft would stand still for something like this. Face it, XML is a straight derivative of SGML and it pre-dates 1997, so how exactly could you get a apply for a patent in 1997 and expect it to hold up?

Small company makes big claims on XML patents | Tech News on ZDNet
Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of “data in neutral forms.” These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to “monetize” this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

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Sun Announces Global Education and Learning Community

In a keynote speech on Wednesday at the Educause annual meeting in Orlando, Mr. McNealy announced the creation of a nonprofit organization called the Global Education and Learning Community, which will provide a framework for educators to work together to develop and distribute educational resources online.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Sharing Teaching Tools Online

Sounds cool, kind of like CALI’s CODEC intiative, or for that matter just about anything CALI does.  Here’s GLEC’s mission: “The community’s mission is to improve global education by empowering
teachers, students and parents with self-paced, web based, free and
open content (curriculum resources, assessment) combined with best
practices for advancing student achievement world wide“

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Try Other OSes With VMware Player

BetaNews | VMware Ships Free Virtual Machine App
VMware on Wednesday introduced VMware Player, a free tool that enables users to run virtual machines on a Linux or Windows PC. The company says that the program would be ideal for those beta testing software, or evaluating pre-built application environments. The release of the Player comes during VMworld, a yearly convention held by the company focusing on virtualized computing.

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