Courseware Engineering

I always new this term came from somewhere, but didn't know where until I found http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1028525 - this paper gives a great overview of what courseware engineering is all about. Essentially it is the use of software engineering methodologies in the development of courseware. The paper also gives a nice definition for courseware. A paper which predates this paper is a paper which was presented at IWALT 2000 by Uden, which presents a Courseware Engineering Methodology. This is interesting as it outlines the use of different models in the "engineering" of courseware.

A new blog is born

So here it is my blog for blogger.com, I have been using eduspaces http://eduspaces.net/markmelia which is pretty neat, so why the change to blogger ( I want to say proposed change because I am still not completely convinced whether I want to continue using eduspaces or blogger) . Well the change is basically due to a URL being available - markmelia.blogspot.com - tonight I got a lesson in how important it is to some people to have their name registered as a domain name - for example - markmelia.com, I never thought of this as really important, not unless I was going to use it, but today people seem to associate their domain name on the web with their sense of individual. I am Mark Melia in the real world, and markmelia.com in the web world.

So what does this mean - we will all be associated with domain names to uniquely id each other in the future - nope, well at least not in the future - think of your email address, this has long since happened. The next stage is a URL, or a URI Universal Resource Indicator - if you are interested in this - possibly you will be interested in some of the more philosophical arguments surrounding the semantic web, which looks to uniquely id every resource in the real world so that it can have a presence in the web and wont be confused with other resources.

So there you go - I got this blog just so I could uniquely identify it as my own because I could use syntax which is the same as my name in the real world - I like to have the virtual world and real world close together.