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Through Downes’, I found out about this nice article about the USA not being such a meritocracy: America’s great universities are increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities. Poorer students are at a huge disadvantage, both when they try to get in and, if they…
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State of blogging
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Through Downes’ I found this to a report on the state of blogging. The numbers are amazing: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get…
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I’ve been working hard at an XML course for the last few months. While I’ve been done a lot of e-business related work in recent years, I didn’t consider myself an XML expert. Still, I’ve been one of the early adopters regarding XML, starting out in 1997-1998 when it was still a cowboyland.…
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Once in a while, you find something on the Web that makes you go “Wow!”. Ever since MathML came along, I’ve been fairly disappointed because it looked like it was designed to work only inside expensive commercial tools. ASCIIMathML proves I was wrong. You can write standard HTML files with…
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Here’s an article giving interesting figures: College Board figures show the number of students older than 25 has increased from 29.9 percent in fall 1999 to 31.1 percent in fall 2003. However, roughly 40 percent of regional and U.S. students are older than age 24, according to the board. In…
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I have been consulting for several years. I think my first consultant job was around 1999 or even 1998. I think I told the story on this blog before: I had planned to finish my Ph.D. and then move into industry. At that point, I faced a wall: very few companies in Montreal were looking for fresh…
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Science Commons
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Here’s an interesting initiative: Science Commons. Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch on January 1, 2005. The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature,…
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Nicolas and Richard write about the start of our project about Blogs for Computer Science Tutors. We are still at the very beginning. In the first phase, Nicolas will be investigating which blog engine is best for this particular use. In the second phase, we’ll need to setup tools for information…
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Open Text Summarizer
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I noticed a few weeks ago a feature in Word that allows you to request that important sentences be outlined. As it turns out, there is a free tool to do this called the Open Text Summarizer. My ex-colleague Peter Turney did related work and has a patent on such a technique.
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I really like Yuhong Yan. She’s one of my favorite collaborator of all times. It is quite strange too because we were colleagues for a long time and never collaborated much at all. Then, I left my NRC job, I went to live something like 700 km away and since then, we’ve never been closer. Maybe…
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EC-W e b 2005 (February 19, 2005 / August 23, 2005)
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Object Oriented Learning Objects
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6th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies E C – W e b 2005 August 23 – August 26, 2005 Copenhagen, Denmark http://www.dexa.org A large number of organizations are exploiting the opportunities offered by Internet-based technologies for electronic commerce and…
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Those of you who have broadband and are interested in having more details about the SCTIC-CREPUQ Meeting I described earlier, you can get Stephen Downes’ slides and audio stream on Object Oriented Learning Objects: Slides and the MP3 audio (English and French, 7 megabytes) of my presentation in…
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Here is a very important report:Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004 This study takes a look at online learning in American Universities. Here’s a few facts the study brings to bare. Will online enrollments continue their rapid…
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From Slashdot, I learned that for $3k, one can buy a 1.6TB hard drive similar to normal PC hard drives: IO Data Device’s new ‘HDZ-UE1.6TS’ exemplifies the recent trend towards demand for higher storage capacities — it’s an external hard drive setup offering a total capacity of 1.6TB. Not…
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Affordable TeraBytes