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 Montreal are now available (the audio also includes the
presentations from other panelists, used with permission). In it, I present again the idea of “e-learning as dynamic, unstructured stream of learning resources obtained and organized by learners.” In this talk I extend the idea bit by elaborating on the community aspect of learning resources and outlining how the learning objects should be designed in order to facilitate this. More – much more – on this in the future.

By Stephen Downes, Stephen’s Web,
November 26, 2004

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 electronic business. Companies sell and purchase via the Internet, search engines and directories allow electronic market participants around the globe to locate potential trading partners, and a set of protocols and standards has been established to exchange goods and services via the Internet. The Internet is changing the way how companies and organizations are working, and the amount of innovation and change seems to accelerate. However, numerous technical issues need still to be resolved. The main objective of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, all
interested in electronic commerce and Web technologies and to assess current methodologies and new research directions. Although a natural focus will be on computer science issues, we welcome research contributions from economics, business administration, law, and other disciplines. EC-Web 2005 is organized by the DEXA Association in parallel with DEXA 2005 (16th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications).

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Suggested Topics
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The major topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Auction and Negotiation Technology
* Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
* Business Process Integration
* Business Process Modeling
* Customer Relationship Management
* Decision Support and Optimization in EC
* Digital Goods and Products
* Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
* Enterprise Application Integration
* Electronic Contracting
* Formation of Supply Chains, Coalitions, and Virtual Enterprises
* Grid Computing for EC
* Intellectual Property Licensing
* Interorganizational Systems
* IPR, Legal and Privacy Issues
* Knowledge Discovery in Web-based IS and EC
* Languages and Ontologies for Describing Goods, Services, and Contracts
* Mobile Commerce
* P2P-Computing
* Pricing and Metering of On-Demand Services
* Quality of Service (Performance, Security, Reliabilty, etc.)
* Recommender Systems
* Rule Languages and Rule-based Systems
* Security and Trust in EC
* Semantic Web
* Supply Chain Management and Supplier Relationship Management
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Technologies for EC
* Usability Issues for EC
* User Behavior, Web Usage Mining
* Web Data Quality Aspects
* Web Data Visualization
* Web Services Computing
* Web Site Monitoring
* XML-based Standards
* Applications and Case Studies in EC

Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS)
WADS 2005

August 15 – August 17, 2005
Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Call for Papers

* Submission deadline: Feb. 21, 2005
* Notification: April 25, 2005
* Final version due: May 12, 2005

The Workshop on Algorithms And Data Structures, which alternates with the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, is intended as a forum for researchers in the area of design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. The workshop includes papers presenting original research on algorithms and data structures in all areas, including combinatorics, computational geometry, databases, graphics, and parallel and distributed computing.

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 growth?

• Over 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003.
• Schools expect the number of online students to grow to over 2.6 million by the fall of 2004.
• Schools expect online enrollment growth to accelerate — the expected average growth rate for online students for 2004 is 24.8%, up from 19.8% in 2003.
• Overall, schools were pretty accurate in predicting enrollment growth — last year’s predicted online enrollment for 2003 was 1,920,734; this year’s number from the survey is 1,971,397.

Are students as satisfied with online courses as they are with face-to-face instruction?

• 40.7% of schools offering online courses agree that “students are at least as satisfied” with their online courses, 56.2% are neutral and only 3.1% disagree.

What about the quality of online offerings, do schools continue to believe that it measures up?

• A majority of academic leaders believe that online learning quality is already equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction.
• Three quarters of academic leaders at public colleges and universities believe that online learning quality is equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction.
• Three quarters of all academic leaders believe that online learning quality will be equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction in three years.

In light of these facts, recall my earlier prediction:

I predict that in 5 years, students all over the world will learn Calculus with little input from from instructors (but a lot of input from other students!). They will use sophisticated on-line laboratories and on-line testing, and on-line support. The technology is already here, but we still don’t know how to use it properly.

It looks like it might happen even faster than 5 years! But my prediction is bold enough as it is, so I’ll keep it in its current form.

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 much larger than four 3.5″ hard drives, the HDZ-UE1.6TS goes to show that any (rich) consumer can now easily have a boatload of storage space. (At current conversion rates, this would cost nearly $2,900.)

Maybe $3k seems like a lot but I bet that in 5 years, these beasts will cost under $1k and fit inside a normal PC.

The consequences of so much storage (nearly infinite) are still not well understood, but I believe it could bring about new killer applications we can’t even imagine right now.