Month: July 2004

Four times in the past few days I have received the following message:

You are not authorized to send mail to the DIV28 list
from your mark_grabe@UND.NODAK.EDU account. You might be authorized to send to the list from another of your accounts, or perhaps when using another mail
program which generates slightly different addresses, but LISTSERV has no way to associate this other account or address with yours. If you need assistance or if
you have any question regarding the policy of the DIV28 list, please contact
the list owners: DIV28-request@LISTS.APA.ORG.

Following this automated message was an attached Cool_MP3.zip file.

I am a member of the American Psychological Association, but not DIV 28. This is the reason the message “from me” was rejected. I had to ask around to find out what DIV 28 was. It turns out it is the group of psychologists interested in psychopharmacology (I am not certain I know how to spell this).

This situation is a good example of what is now the most common e-mail virus technique – the virus operates from the computer of a third party, takes two names from that computer’s address book, and sends some message and a virus from one name from the list to the other. If one of he addresses is a listserv, it appears the virus may be sent to the listserv.

It is good listservs have protection against participation by nonmembers. I wonder how many nonmembers are attempting to crash the psychopharmacology listserv? I bet “spoofed email” is a more common problem.

Those who employ automated reply procedures should adjust these procedures to current circumstances. A smart modification would be to not forward any attachments. Division 28 of APA ends up sending me “back” a virus I did not send them in the first place.

One nice thing about a Mac – you see the file extension. Would you open a Music_MP3.zip file from the American Psychological Association?

The e-rate has received a great deal of negative publicity because of institutional fraud and improper commercial practices associated with e-Rate resources. Critic of the e-Rate program have seized upon these improprities to argue against the program. In attempting to defend itself, the FCC is oganizing a conference to showcase some of the positive accomplishments of the program – see eSchool News description.

I am intrigued by the Open Source movement. The idea that programmers would create high quality software and give it away because they feel it is the right thing to do is very interesting. See previous post regarding Open Office.

A similar idea is surfacing regarding course experiences. The idea is that prestigous institutions will give away courses. Exactly what this means and what such resources will look like has yet to fully emerge. Will this effort result in “learning objects” that are “static” information resource (in the sense that lectures are an information source like a book) or will this be more inclusive and involve interactive experiences (scored activities, simulations)? Will the evaluation be built in and whose standards would apply?

You can experiment right now. Explore MIT OpenCourseWare. My strategy for evaluating such resources is to try to use them myself – it is not enough to read what someone else has to say or to glance through the resource. My personal experiment is based on the statistics course from Carnegie Mellon. Statistics is a content area for which my academic training provides enough expertise that I can move quickly and also compare my personal experiences with courses at my institution. I have only a couple of hours invested at this point and it would be inappropriate to generalize in any way – I do encourage others to form their own personal opinions in this way.

Take the time to examine the Carnegie Mellon research agenda which can be accessed using a link on the home page.

The Seattle Times ran a recent article on blogs and reports that Bill Gates may start his own blog. I have read other Gates works “The Road Ahead”, “Business @ the speed of thought” and he (with co-authors) does have some interesting things to say.

Gates Web page

The Center for Science Education offers an online manual (PDF) for educators looking for CD and Internet science resources. Educators are provided with thirteen key questionbs to use as a guide.

eSchool News ran a recent article summarizing a survey conducted by the Business Software Alliance. More than half of the young people responding admitted to downloading music and about 1/3 to downloading games. A significant proportion can provide an adequate definition for copyright and understand the content they are downloading is protected.

The survey suggests that the problem most frequently occurs at home and that parents are aware of what their children are doing.

BSA suggests a “Play it Safe in CyberSpace Curriculum it helped developed for Weekly Reader. This material offers resources for students, teachers, and parents.