Learning Aloud

I have become fascinated with the Library of Congress series on the digital future. I strongly encourage you to visit this site and view the presentations.

The presentation from Dec. 13 concerned the potential of digitizing everything. One of the examples concerned keeping a record (over time) of the Internet. The presenter, Brewster Kahle, discussed the “Way Back Machine.” This is a fascinating project. I tried it with my original web site and it has my material back to 1997. Not that anyone but me might care about the origins of my web material, but the idea is fascinating when applied to other content.

Google is “going back to the future” (my apologies the movie writer I stole this from) and working with the Harvard libraries to develop technologies to provide access to library holdings. Harvard has about 15 million volumes so it represents a good test site.

The back to the future comment – my way of saying that students may actually rediscover the library.

See my earlier post regarding a similar project at the Library of Congress

I am turning off the comments option on this blog. Too many spammers use this feature to add their messages and links to their sites. You do not see these comments because I must approve comments before they appear. Because nearly all comments have been spam, this review process may not be worth the effort. Maybe I will try the comment option again after some time has passed.

This link is really for my faculty colleagues. North Dakota entered into an agreement with PeopleSoft to provide an online system to integrate all services at all institutions within the state. So student records, the library, alumni programs, grants and contracts, etc. all operate through one huge system. In the middle of this process, PeopleSoft and Oracle became involved in a controvery – not the type of thing you want to see if you have already committed millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours to moving to a system of this magnitude.

This weekend it was announced that Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft. It is hard to know what this means, but it has always been troubling to me when the options available to the public in any domain dwindle to nearly nothing.

The Discovery Channel offers a collection of online tools –
Teaching Tools – that provide a puzzle generator, worksheet maker, etc. Some of the math activities are linked to solution pages.

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) is urging state officials to get up to date and allow digital media to be purchased as course “textbooks.” Some states evidently define how textbook money can be spent in a way that excludes digital resournces. While the interest of the SIIA is obviously self serving, the question is still valid.

eSchools News Online analysis

China is backing a new search engine, Accoona.com (as in accoona matata), which it claims will compete with Google.