Seb Schmoller's latest Fortnightly Mailing includes a piece by Mark van Harmelen about the state of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) in the UK, focusing especially on a recent meeting at Manchester University sponsored by CETIS (Center for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards). The post focuses not only on emerging Web 2.0 tools but on client tools being developed by groups like CETIS.

Van Harmelan writes, "Importantly, and picking up on threads that have been emerging in the Blogosphere over the last two and a half years, PLEs are increasingly seen as a vehicle for self-directed and group-based learning, where individual learners construct their own agendas and learning programmes to satisfy their own learning goals. As such, the PLE revolution harbours two important threads, a change in learning style in institutions, and a spilling over of learning technology from institutions to non-institutional life."

OCLC recently published a report with the admittedly less-than-thrilling title "College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources" which examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of 400 international college students. They surveyed college students from Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States about what they think about libraries and search engines. The results are somewhat suprising, in that the library turns out to not be as irrelevant to students' intellectual lives as much of the NetGen literature suggests. The authors of the report do suggest, however, that the library has a marketing problem, in that its 'brand' is the book. They write: 

The Open Course intitiative started at MIT several years ago has prompted several similar programs, including an interesting one at Carnegie Mellon. Their program features intellectual grounding in "Cognitively-informed Education” and "Data-driven Iteration," and employs cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, and simulations. Assessment and evaluation tools are built into the courses, and it will be especially interesting to see how successful this OLI is in creating the "community of use" they want to build. The first courses developed through OLI are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, and Logic.

OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey, by way of his blog, provides us with a  useful set of ruminations about how to think about the future of the library catalog, and a framework for asking that question in a broader context. Along the way, he also places a number of other library services (Interlibrary Loan, Federated Search) into that framework, providing useful ways to think about all of the evolutions implicated in the suprisingly rapid transition to a more fully networked information system.  On the catalog, he writes:

Michael Carroll, Law Professor at Villanova University School of Law , Creative Commons Board Member, and Blogger, turns up the heat in the on-going debate over pending federal legislation that would force open access to research supported with federal money. He suggests that publishers, not content to settle for the obvious economic arguments against open access, have begun working a less savory side of the street: an appeal to elitism. He writes: