Welcome to a series of interviews with e-learning and distance professionals. This week's interview is with Leah Piatt, Duke University, who is involved in corporate training and adult education. What is your name, and what is your involvement with e-learning?...

Today the University of Edinburgh announced an on-line experiment to test how older computer users perceive synthetic voices. Little work has been done on this subject involving this age group, so participant results will provide more information on making voice...

Playing the blame game is more than a simple matter of accepting Harry Truman's mantra of "The buck stops here." It entails a comprehensive philosophy about life and vision. It means you believe in your own ideas and plans strongly enough that your only challenge is to execute them properly in order to be successful. It means that you have crafted your plans carefully and have accounted for all but the most unforeseeable contingencies. It means that, when things don't go as you had hoped, you accept it as a simple lack of execution or vision, but also as an opportunity to improve.

As education changes, so must the way we conceive of and develop products for education. From textbooks to simulations, content and product providers of all kinds (publishing companies to private schools) must rethink the way they do business. In this article, I have listed my five laws of product development in the 21st Century. These are intended to serve as guidelines for thinking, product planning, and business strategy.

First-person narrators are one of the things I like most about blogging. I enjoy getting to know the various personalities involved, the nuances and eccentricities that are personal and unique to each. I enjoy the passion that comes with the individualism and I believe the dialogue their pleas engender are important. But, as a practiced reader, I do not read blogs under the illusion that they are somehow neutral or unbiased as individual narratives. In fact, I assume in the course of my reading that individual blogs are likely unreliable (especially this one).

With blogs and the Web, it seems that informal and organic lists pop around us on a minute-by-minute basis. Who has time to go out looking for trouble by scoring the New York Times suggestions or actually paying attention to the recommended lists on Amazon or iTunes? At least that's the excuse I was going with until my daughter asked me what books I recommended that she read. Imagine, if you can, the amazing and humorous flexibility with which I suddenly shifted positions, put on a combination persona mixed of father and academic, and started to hack out a list of books that my eighteen year old daughter should read. In the end, I poured through the mental files of my old literary haunts and took inventory of the diverse fiction I've read on airplanes over the past four years.

From the mind of Hendrik Hertzberg:

"'I know her well enough to be able to say that she's not going to change, that twenty years from now she'll be the same person with the same philosophy that she is today,' Bush pleaded at his press conference. He's probably right, even though Miers used to be a Democrat and a Catholic and now she's a Republican and a Protestant. (Perhaps Bush subscribes to a kind of evangelical Brezhnev Doctrine, under which being born again admits of no retreat.)"

--Published in The New Yorker, October 17, 2005

Hey, if Harper's can do it, why can't we? Here's a list of eye-opening stats (such as dates, percentages, and other numbers) which you may need to know for our first exam.

Maybe Lincoln was in the closet with his sexuality, maybe Jefferson was inconsistent about who deserved freedom, and maybe Franklin was incommunicado about part of the truth. How come history is so fluid?

Today, XplanaZine launches it's quarterly supplement, Mosaic.We chose the name Mosaic because the philosophy behind the art of mosaic tiling describes the approach we take with this supplement. Each tile in and of itself is just a tile, but when arranged together they form a picture. That's our supplement. Each of our pieces by themselves are just nice little bits, but printed together they work directly or tangentially to form a picture.

How well have you been communicating lately? How do you evaluate the communication abilities of those around you? This list of questions regarding the styles and effects of communication is worth considering.

Sometimes, when you look at something through the same perspective long enough, you fail to notice what you are looking at. This view of the American educational system from a former Russian national can help us see what really is before us.

To the Bush Administration: Since you're hiring pundits to spread the word about your policies -- make me an offer.

Conservative television pontificator Armstrong Williams has taken $240,000 from the Bush Administration to promote the No Child Left Behind Act. Our response can be either enraged or engaged.

As university graduates prepare to leave their familiar college surroundings for futures unknown, this convocation speech urges them to consider the possibility that being true to one's self might be the surest path to certainty.

Your frustration may be justified but it should never be misdirected. Here are some suggestions on how to improve an infuriating situation.

One of the best presents you can give your children is the awareness of how to stay out of debt.

It's time to take a look at the real dynamics behind the trend of excessive labeling that our society is practicing.

If giving thanks really worked, wouldn't we make each day Thanksgiving?

Children are often labeled "underachievers" by their parents and school systems, but a clearer look will reveal that these children are accomplishing whatever they set their minds to.

Unhealthy foods are causing dangerous health problems for today's students.

XplanaZine gets a new editor and an expanded scope.