Another typical April Fool's Day on the Internet yesterday. My favorite from Slashdot was the Instant Messaging Vulnerable To New Smiley Attacks.

At the 2009 meeting of the Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I mentioned that our department is designing a new 300-level course for our writing major at Grand Valley State University: Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright.

Last week, I posted to Kairosnews about Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, a new open access writing textbook. This has been a long time coming. Pavel Zemliansky and I have discussed it for a few years now. Technology and other opportunities have finally made such a project possible.

And maybe now the time is right. Textbooks are a hidden cost that impact how much students can pay for tuition. It's doubtful that the current economic crisis will end anytime soon. If higher education could reduce textbook outlays by students, some of that money could be as a savings for the student to reduce the overall cost of education, and some of it in tuition increase. It's a matter of economics. Is the commercial textbook industry the most economical method of providing textbooks for students? Doesn't seem like it to me.

Rodriogo y Gabriela and have a new song, OK Tokyo, from their Live In Japan album (see below).

I started looking for open source and no royalty fee icon sets for a project I expect to do later in the semester. Here is my list in progress:

As I see others working with how to create a more usable DrupalEd installation for Drupal 6x, I am reminded of back in 2004 when I released the very first incarnation of DrupalEd.

At that time, I believed that the robust solution for Drupal as a learning platform was to adopt the portal model used by Blackboard and other LMS's. The portal would be the top site in in the domain of a multisite installation (or perhaps the main school website would be, but either way works if there is a portal), with each classroom site an independent site within the multi-site setup. When profiles were invented, I always imagined that the main Drupal portal site would allow a teacher to pick from various site types of functionality: "I need "