DECOM 2008 is organised in partnership by the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and its member, Giunti Labs, the leading European provider of online and mobile learning content management solutions. It will be held on 23rd of October, in Sestri Levante, North West Italy. The invited delegates will be able to improve their understanding of new generation learning content production, management, sharing and distribution models which will empower the Educational Publishing Industry in this new millennium.

More at http://www.decom2008.com/

Anyway, I will probably come back to this topic in the future.

If you have tips about how to solve this problem, please give them to me!

This event, the third in ISKO UK’s KOnnecting KOmmunities series, was an opportunity to learn more about SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the up-and-coming standard for publishing controlled vocabularies on the Web.

The topic proved to be enormously popular. There were 94 people present coming from government, publishing and broadcasting agencies, public service organisations, commercial companies and academia. Reassuringly many practitioners were present including subject matter experts, librarians, information architects, software developers etc.
We were fortunate in having speakers from the forefront of SKOS development and implementation who were able to draw a general picture of the role of knowledge organization systems in the Semantic Web development but also guide us through the intricate details of what it means to express controlled vocabularies in such a way so that they their semantics can be exploited in information integration and discovery.

While you can’t get college credit for taking open courseware classes, you can make the most of the information and education they offer both in personal and professional aspects of your life. After all, even if you’re not working towards a degree, taking the same courses as those in the ivy league can’t possibly hurt you and may even be able to better keep you informed and on the cutting edge of what’s going on in your field. So how can you make the most of these free online courses? Here are resources we’ve collected that can help you search for classes, find information and learn everything you need to know about how open courseware works.

Samhälle Portugal kommer att köpa in 500 000 av Intels Classmate pc under det kommande året. Det är den största beställningen av företagets billiga dator. Via Computer Sweden.

Den pågående utvecklingen mot små och billiga bärbara datorer är som sagt intressant. Sannolikt kommer vi att få se fler projekt - om än inte lika storskaliga. Jag hoppas att vi även får se svenska projekt!

I have now managed to solve this problem by downloading an older Safari (version 2.04) from here, launch it, and change the preferences for saving downloaded files. I changed it to the /tmp/ directory. Firefox  apparently uses the Safari setting for saving files that are opened directly from the Internet, but it doesn’t work to change the setting in Safari 3.0…

Satisfied at last:)

Det taiwanesiska företaget Carapelli har släppt vad företaget hävdar är världens billigaste laptop. Datorn som kostar endast 130 dollar är riktigt intressant om du inte har för stora krav på hårdvara.

Den bärbara datorn Impulse NPX-9000 levereras med en bildskärm på sju tum och operativsystemet Linux. Datorn har en processor på 400 MHz, 128 megabyte ramminne och 1 GB flashminne som lagringsenhet.

Trådlös internetadapter ingår inte men finns som tillbehör. Open Office programsvit kommer förinstallerat på hårddisken tillsammans med en webbläsare och ett gäng multimedieprogram.

Det finns bara en hake, Impulse NPX-9000 går endast att köpa i bulk bestående av 100 datorer. Något som endast är intressant för återförsäljare eller större företag.

Samt skolor och andra utbildningsinstitutioner skulle man kanske kunna tillägga…?

Maybe the aim for one laptop per student is starting to be realistic now? With a price under €300 it is actually possible finance an effort to give each one of our teacher students their own laptop! A project that I wrote about a year ago (in Swedish). Maybe we will be able to realize it now? We will start evaluating some of the ultraportables during the autumn.

A couple of models that looks interesting are the MSI Wind , The Asus Eee series , the Acer Aspire One and the VIA OpenBook – which more seem to be an architecture platform.

Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)
(Formerly Learning Object Discovery & Exchange - LODE1)
 
 
CALL FOR PAPERS — NEW DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2008 
 
The SE@M workshop is held in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’08 - http://www.ectel08.org/), Maastricht School
of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17-19, 2008.
 
CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs
substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The
TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of
better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of 
reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE
Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge.
Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or
by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and
cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.
 
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these
issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange,
GLOBE, CORDRA) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and
unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of
the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these
initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and
retrieval of distributed learning resources.
 
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning
materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of
learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future
collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners
can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the
latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging
learning content.
 
The dominant focus of this year’s workshop will be on the presentation of both long
and short refereed papers. We also plan to include a keynote speech and a panel
discussion.
                                                

Note: It has been decided to rename the workshop: “international workshop on
search & exchange of e-le@rning materials (SE@M)” to avoid any confusion with
the work of IMS on Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (IMS LODE). 
 
 2
 
TOPICS OF INTEREST (include, but are not limited to)
• Infrastructures for learning resource discovery and exchange
o Interoperable content and metadata repositories
o Protocols for exposing content
o Federations of learning resources
o Service registries
• Rich description of resources
o Metadata
o Standards and application profiles
o Automatic metadata generation versus human indexing
o Intellectual property and metadata
o Contextual Attention Metadata
o Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
• Discovering content
o User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
o Retrieval of learning resources (searching, browsing)
o Content aggregation
o Interoperable query languages
o Harvesting versus federated searching
o Enhanced search mechanism (sorting, ranking)
o Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
o Recommendation systems
o Quality aspects
• Exchanging content
o Resource identification
o Open content and reusable resource licensing
o Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting) 
o DRM, licensing and content protection
• WEB-2.0 approaches (folksonomies, content syndication) 
• Semantic web approaches
 
 SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or
work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed
by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.
Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the
CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series,
ISSN 1613-0073.
 
Moreover, the two best papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the
International Journal of Technology-Enhanced  Learning
(IJTEL –  http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel )
 
Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs ).

For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors“ instructions at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html .
All questions and submissions should be sent to: seam2008@eun.org

IMPORTANT DATES
• Paper Submission: June 30, 2008
• Notification of acceptance: July 13, 2008
• Camera Ready Submission: August 10, 2008
• Workshop date: September 17, 2007
 
ORGANISERS
David Massart, Jean-Noël Colin and Frans Van Assche
European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
• Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 
• Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium 
• Mike Halm, PennState University, USA 
• Manuel Kolp, UCL, Belgium 
• Robert Kristofl, BMUKK, Austria 
• Eugenijus Kurilovas, SMM, Lithuania 
• Jon Mason, InterCog, Australia
• Cu D. Nguyen, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-IRST), Italy
• Gilbert Paquette, Teluq, Canada 
• Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå University, Sweden 
• Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland 
• Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium 
• Daniel Rehak, Learning Systems Architecture Lab and Daniel Rehak Consulting LLC, USA 
• Griff Richards, SFU, Canada 
• Bernd Simon, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria 
• Stefaan Ternier, KUL, Belgium 
• Tsuneo Yamada, NIME, Japan 

På mindre än en vecka har den nya hemsidan för Nätverket Stoppa FRA-lagen fått 310 000 unika besökare. Ett svindlande stort gensvar, ungefär hälften av vad svd.se har varje vecka

Idag skriver SvD om Mikael Nilssons och Anna Petersson och deras initiativ för att stoppa FRA-lagen. Jättebra att det äntligen blir uppmärksamhet kring detta! All publicitet behövs. Hoppas verkligen att majoriteten av våra riksdagsmän och riksdagskvinnor är begåvade nog att de sitter i riksdagen som representanter för den svenska demokratin - inte för att avskaffa det!

Går det liggande förslaget igenom kommer vi med riksdagens goda minne att bygga ett storskaligt övervakningssamhälle, där all epost, alla sms, all datatrafik och alla telefonsamtal som passerar Sveriges gränser kommer att avlyssnas. Utan att det föreligger någon misstanke om brott.

Tidningar och tv har bevakat frågan i så liten utsträckning att folk helt enkelt har missat att vi nu är mindre än en vecka från att införa ett otäckt och oåterkalleligt storebrorssamhälle. Ett sämre betyg för den samhällsbevakande journalistiken går inte att få i Sverige 2008.

FRA-lagen är som om hela IB-affären skulle ha rullats upp inför öppen ridå i riksdagen, utan att någon ens orkat bry sig. Den ställer samma frågor om moral, rättsäkerhet och demokrati och den rymmer samma dimensioner om Sveriges relationer till främmande makt (eftersom underrättelseinformation naturligtvis är en bytesvara, nu som då).

Via vondewall.com

Den 17 juni röstar Sveriges riksdag om att införa allmän avlyssning av alla svenska medborgare. Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) ges i uppdrag att avlyssna all kabelburen kommunikation som passerar Sveriges gränser. Nästan all kommunikation, även inom Sverige, passerar idag gränsen och kommer därmed att avlyssnas. E-post, sms, webbtrafik, chattar och mobil- och telefonsamtal, allt analyseras. Ingen domstol är inblandad. Ingen brottsmisstanke krävs. Alla behandlas som misstänkta. Även regering och myndigheter ges befogenhet att söka i den privata kommunikationen. Lagen öppnar för nya, godtyckliga användningsområden. Materialet kan dessutom lätt missbrukas eller hamna i fel händer. Källskydd och meddelarfrihet blir tomma ord när varje kontakt med media kan vara avlyssnad. Avlyssningen ska skydda mot odefinierade ”yttre hot”. I själva verket utgör den nya lagen i sig ett allvarligt hot mot det öppna och fria samhället.

Quick, grab your tin foil hats and prepare to speculate because Microsoft has agreed to support the Open Document Format (ODF) in Microsoft Office. The move represents a huge shift from the company’s hard-fought battle to convince the world that its own OOXML format was superior to ODF.

But Microsoft seems to have had a change of heart and says that Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will support the ODF, the default file format of OpenOffice, Sun’s StarOffice and more. More impressive than just support, the next revision of Office will allow users to set ODF as their default format for new documents.

However, Microsoft’s credibility regarding standards is not on top and the EU commission have announced that they will investigate MS ODF-support (article in swedish [Computer Sweden] or article in english [The Tech Herald]).