My final summary from alt-i-lab (since I’m leaving to go home in an hour). ...

Here’s a day one summary from Alt-i-lab. Also check “Raymond’s blog”:http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee/. ...

Here is some more detail on the new journal I described recently. ...

Spotted on OLDaily: “Jeff Jarvis says out loud what everybody has been thinking: ‘The real point: Ultimately, your content is more valuable than professional content.’ Think about that. When you open the morning mail, and you have a letter from your Aunt Mabel and a copy of a glossy magazine, which do you open first? A lot follows from this simple observation, and while I’m not sure how much of it AOL understands, it is clear that the get at least some of it.” Read more at “The BuzzMachine”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_07.html#004146. This article included another real gem: “It isn’t content until it’s linked.”

More response to comments from Stephen regarding the OpenContent / cc.edu goings-on. ...

They say “No good deed goes unpuinished.” So it is fitting that “some people”:http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/research.cgi?item=1057097186 are complaining about the closing of OpenContent. ...

Charles Kerns wrote to say that Stanford has officially released their open source course management system, “CourseWork”:http://coursework-demo.stanford.edu/coursework/. The system looks to do everything most people would want out of the box, and – being open source – can be made to do whatever else you like. Summarizing from the Stanford site: “CourseWork is an open source course management system, designed to provide an open, modular framework for learning objects. It uses OKI APIs whenever possible. Stanford’s implementation of CourseWork runs with the Apache web server, using TomCat 3.0 for the Java servlet server. DTL (Display Template Language), developed at Stanford, is used to create the presentation displays. The database back end is Oracle (but CW has also been ported to PostgreSQL). CourseWork has been run on both Sun Solaris and Linux. ...

Here is a quick recap of the days’ events (EdMedia LO Symposium), with some photos. I won’t provide too detailed a summary; for that, just go read the papers. ...

So, after a very long delay, here is the draft language of the Creative Commons license option for permitting only educational uses: _You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above except in satisfaction of both of the following conditions: (i) You do so in a manner that is directly related to and of material assistance to the primary teaching and learning activities of an educational institution, and (ii) You do so solely for educational purposes. An “educational institution” is a school or other organization primarily and directly engaged in facilitating teaching and learning._ Rationale below. Please direct comments to the cc-education list. ...

The notion of analogizing learning objects as words seems to be getting popular again. “Learning objects, formal languages, grammars, and instructional design”:http://opencontent.org/docs/lo_grammar.pdf quickly summarizes my thinking on the topic and goes on to argue that formal grammars (ala linguistics or computer science) can be used to describe certain scenarios of learning objects use in a formal, unambiguous manner. (Of course, the class of use scenarios I find most interesting _can’t_ be described this way.) The paper suggests some other uses for formal languages in ID, including the development of standard metamodels for families of instructional design approaches.