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August 2006

August 09, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000805.html

http://stu.dicio.us/



Thought I've been away I did try to catch up in Bloglines the last 2 days and I didn't see this making the rounds so hopefully of interest - stu.dicio.us, while still in beta, is an incredibly simple student-focused tool that currently supports note taking and scheduling, with file storage and self grade-tracking coming soon. There are three things about it that are really beautiful:



- it is REALLY simple, and yet quite useful. Try the note creation facility; it's a very nice web-based outliner that uses keyboard commands (more below)



- all class notes are shared (you have to agree to this to use the system). So not only does this create an ecology of class notes for individual classes (with basic 'tagging' principles in play as to how to identify a class, no heavyweight SIS-integration here) but by searching on certain terms you may find class notes from other classes, even from other institutions, around specific keywords (which does raise quality issues, but one assumes the developers could bring practices from other social softwares to bear here).



- based on the amazingly simple interface, I assume (though I couldn't find such an announcement on their site) that a prime target for the app will be cell phones/PDAs and other mobile devices.



So... a web-based, mobile-accessible site for students to store THEIR notes/information about THEIR studies, which simultaneously gives them access to other students' notes as well. So cool. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000804.html

http://www.kineo.co.uk/ideas/

future-of-e-learning-in-universities.html



http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0648.asp



At some point in the fall I have to dust off my crystal ball for a presentation on 'the future of LMS' (yikes!) so I've been keeping my eye on various 'Future of...' presentations of late, and recently came across these two.



The first, a report by Kineo and Intel, promises to be on the "Future of E-learning in Universities." While it looked promising, I found it ultimately pretty disappointing; fairly safe predictions on a very near future in which universities plod down the same CMS/VLE path of elearning with a little wireless thrown in for good measure. It's likely pretty accurate in the 2-3 year range, but uninspiring at best.



More interesting to me is the piece by Morton Egol in the latest Educause Review titled "The Future of Higher Education." While comparing these two articles is maybe a bit of apples-to-oranges, the vision he presents of "Community Learning Centres" is for me a far more interesting one to contemplate and seems to fit much better with some of the dissatisfactions with current models that I regularly hear grumbled in the edublogosphere. Undoubtedly many will be troubled with the vision of corporate entities entering the formerly public space of education, but (at least in the US and perhaps elsewhere) this burgeoning reality does need to be engaged with, as does the notion that K-12 represents a competitive threat to higher education. What!?! The argument goes that in the new model, "that with self-paced learning, thirteen years (K-12), including internships, provide ample learning to qualify for entry-level positions." If it seems unlikely, maybe contemplate the phenomenom of kids jumping from high school directly into professional athletics, which 25 years ago was unheard of. I heard a similar notion almost 10 years ago by the president of Mount Royal College who described the greatest threat to the College as not the neighboring colleges and universities but large corporate entities and commercial certification bodies that would take students direclty from high school and train them in the workforce.



Which brings me finally to the prognostication which I've recently enjoyed most, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information which I revisted over my holiday. I wanted to go back to the final chapter on 'Re-Education' (an earlier version of which can be found on the web in this paper titled 'Universities in the Digital Age.') While the book is now 6 years old, I think much of it holds up well, and the message (summed up by one reviewer as "it's the people, stupid"), especially in the education chapter, challenges the predominant "informational" picture of learning with a social one, tries to preserve the positive aspects of the university while asking what new forms 'degree granting bodies' could take, and I think also resonates really well with many of the dissatisfactions with the status quo apparent in the edublogosphere.



The caveats at the end of the chapter are well worth noting - it is entirely possible that higher ed institutions will prove to have more staying power than any of us could predict and survive the current digital revolution largely intact. But somehow this seems unlikely. For a while I've been carrying around the question of "what would a post-secondary institution that took seriously the disruptions poised by social software and emerging visions of learning (and the mass amaturization of everything) look like?" But after re-reading this book I'm wondering if I've framed that wrong; maybe the question is "how can we preserve the positive aspects of how higher education currently creates and shares knowledge while designing learning technologies that compliment, improve and expand that social formation?" - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000803.html

http://www.educause.edu/2006/10958



From the "that's not a zeitgeist, just a bump in the road" department comes this news, that the inaugural winner of the new Educause 'Catalyst' award is "Course Management Systems" (yes, the entire field of them, not just a signle one, competing claims to the contrary notwithstanding). What's so interesting, though, in light of those recent claims, is to read the text of the award which talks about CMS being "developed among faculty in pockets of innovation throughout the world" and that the "developers of these systems pulled together many strands of technology." [empasis mine] Indeed! - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000800.html

http://www.campus-technology.com/

news_article.asp?id=18864&typeid=155



This article is a follow up to one written 2 years ago by Frank Tansey's son, now a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound. It is of course purely anecdotal so its unfair to draw broad conclusions from it, but for me it provides a refreshing perspective on the issue.



The situation described seems to be very much a 'blended learning' or 'classroom augmented' use of a CMS (in this case Blackboard). The advantages seem to be along the lines that regular use of the CMS by instructors makes for more efficient, effective and engaged classroom work, and the biggest danger seems to be uneven use by faculty.



The recommendations reflect, unsurprisingly, an 'outsiders' view of how post-secondary institutions should work, giving far too much credit to the power of central authority and far too little responsibility on the shoulders of individual faculty (but then the decision making and management itself of the CMSes often naively perpetuates this mis-casting, as the LMS governance report I pointed to last week made clear.) Still well worth the quick read. - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000799.html

http://moodle.org/sites/index.php?country=all



Michael Penney wrote in to let me know that the map of Moodle deployments world-wide that I pined for earlier already exists. While I'm pretty sure this map is not an exact representation of the state of affairs (otherwise Alice Springs is surely the hotbed of all Moodle deployments, with New Orleans a close second) it does give you a sense of how truly spread across the globe the 13,000 or so adopters of Moodle are. (Michael also pointed me to the 'stats' pages, which display quite vividly Moodle's meteroic adoption curve.) - SWL

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August 11, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000807.html

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923465



This is an important new paper by William McGeveran and William Fisher from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It's not exactly earth shattering content for people regularly working on the issue of sharing and reusing digital resources for education, but it is fairly comprehensive (from a US perspective at least) and done by lawyers, the type of document that can potentially have some legitimacy with politicians and other decision makers (and yes, I believe in faeries too!) The Mellon Foundation is to be commended for funding it. I loved their case studies, especially the one that has a media prof cracking DRM controls with freely available tools so as to be able to create a clips reel for his class. That would never happen ;-) - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000806.html

CIPO - Patent - 2535407



Thanks to Barry Dahl and his Desire2Blog for pointing out that the Canadian patent office is apparently as uninformed as the US one. - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000801.html


Off to the beach until August 8 for 3 weeks holidays (hooray!) See y'all soon, Scott

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000794.html

http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/

telars/talmet/melbmonash/

media/LMSGovernanceFinalReport.pdf



Stephen's already recommended it, but I'll second that recommendation - this is an "interesting and well-informed" report and another one you should try to get in front of as many decision makers' faces as possible. I'm really grateful to have read it, if only for the references to Paul Pangaro and M.C. Geoghegan that I am looking forward to following up.



It's not meant as a technical paper so it can't be faulted for not providing a solution to this:

"the trick for universities may not be to try to create the same spaces within the confines of the university computer network, but rather to make sure that members of the university are able to forge links between their university identity and their other online learning communities."


Easier said than done.



I do think the section on "Reviewing the business case for LMS" could be strengthened, there's some straw men there, but that's nit picking. The biggest missing piece for me concerns acknowledging the key role in institutional learning of 'credentialing' - not to reduce it to that, but to acknowledge that in the nirvana of self-forming online learning communities and self-directed learners someone is going to have to start talking about the relationship between that learning and the powerful role of credentialling (and to be fair, this isn't just the institutions of higher ed involved in this, it's governments, accrediting bodies, professional organizations, etc.). If you don't think it's an issue though, I can point you to 1000 cabbies with medical and law degrees from other nations who would beg to differ. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000793.html

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/

article.pl?sid=06/05/16/0247214



If you've never read it before, I highly recommend The Walrus as one of the best Canadian "general interest" print mags out there (they post back issues online). In the June issue they published a piece by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow titled "A House Half Built" on the shaky future of Canadian federalism that I thought to point to, in part because of our national holiday tomorrow, and in part because I was reminded of it again by this recent discussion on Ulises Mejias blog Ideant about "Socialist Software".



The part of Romanov's piece that stuck in my mind was actually not by him, but a quote by former Saskatchewan deputy Attorney General, John Whyte:



"A nation is built when the communities that comprise it make commitments to it, when they forego choices and opportunities on behalf of a nation...when the communities that comprise it make compromises, when they offer each other guarantees, when they make transfers, and perhaps most pointedly, when they receive from others the benefits of national solidarity. The threads of a thousand acts of accommodation are the fabric of a nation...."


Now if I was really smart I would somehow connect this back to the great discussion that unfolded on Ideant, but I'm not, and I have to go enjoy my July long weekend (plus our washer just exploded and we've water all over the basement, oy vey!). But I am left with a nagging feeling that the social interactions fostered by 'social software' are all too solipsistic, or at best are an "echo chamber," and that the way in which we interface with them, sitting in front of screens typing away, allows us a safety that one does not get when there is real territory, real resources, real people involved, staring you in the face. But then I'm also someone who always thought Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkely was pretty good too. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000792.html

http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-map/index.php



Want to know where Sakai is in production and who the other partners are? Check out this map from Chuck Severance, recently named the head of the Sakai Foundation. An interesting point that Dr. Severance points out in this short video is that 46% of people paying into the Sakai foundation are not in fact implementing it at all yet, either as a pilot or in production; he explains this as being about people paying to "make the market a better place." Here's hoping it does. Would love to see a similar map of Moodle adoption throughout the world! - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000791.html

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/

opening_education/social_software_01.htm



I wanted to like this paper but was frustrated with the first 12 pages or so, mostly because it is just review of the 'social software' field and forrays into how knowledge and learning are changing à la Downes and Siemens. Nothing particularly wrong with it, just nothing that new.



But it was worth sticking with for the practical suggestions in section 4, "How Do We Move Towards 'C-LearningÂ’?" especially the section on what educators can do...



"You can plan your curriculum as though education does not stop at the classroom walls."


Doesn't get much more succinct than that! Or this line - "In particular, schools should not expect students to leave the 21st century in the cloakroom."



This is an important paper. It is both academically respectable, readable (though a little longish for time constrained Deputy Ministers and the like) and 'gets it' without being fanatical or evangelical. Send it on to those who can help affect this change. - SWL

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August 15, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000808.html

http://gong.ust.hk/index.html



During my holidays I received an email from Dr David Rossiter and Gibson Lam from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology inviting me to try out some software they had developed called Gong. I am often hesitant about blogging such invitations and didn't even manage to get around to trying it until today because of the backlog of email etc., from my holiday. But after trying it out I am glad I did.



Free voice recording might not seem like much in the age of Odeo and the like, but this is, to my eye, much more. The Java-based client-server program has been built very much with an eye to teaching languages but looks like it could be useful for anyone wanting to include voice in their online clases. It supports the creation of voice-based message boards and forums, and the client allows users to index their recordings to text, meaning subsequent viewers can see the text 'read' while they hear the message, and jump to specific parts of the message by clicking on that word (for instance on a particularly confusing spelling, as often happens with English). Recorders of messages can also edit the message directly in the client after the fact, easily removing awkward pauses and silences. Additionally, listeners can slow down aqnd speed up the playback of messages on demand.



And if all that isn't enough, it can support synchronous audio chat sessions as well. Did I mention that there is also an existing Moodle module that allows creation of Gong 'boards' directly in Moodle. And that it has an API. Oh, and it's free too (but not 'yet' open source.) Well worth a look for language teachers or for anyone wanting to incorporate voice recording into their online classes for free. - SWL

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August 16, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000809.html

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (0df3b1e3-63dd-4c12-8efa-834dba1001d8)

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August 21, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000811.html

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/docs/pdf/

automated_metadata_report.pdf



If you don't have the pleasure of being a metadata geek in your day job then, move along folks, nothing to see here.



For the 9 and 3/4 people still reading this post, this report from Jorum is worth a read, though not the magic bullet you'd hoped for from the title. The report mainly looks at Jorum's own practices in regards to automating metadata collection for learning resources (sensible enough too, mostly all ones we practice in SOL*R) and near the end surveys 5 other systems out there to consider what lessons are to be learned. Another that could have been included here as potentially useful is Yahoo's Term Extraction Service, but as is the case of the others they look at, it holds no magic solution.



The report ends with a list of recommendations for the Jorum service, all of which seem very sensible as an approach to incremental improvements. I wish I could say more, but I am in such the same boat that I won't. Suffice to say the 'Survivors of LOR' support group is meeting at my house on Wednesday, new members always welcome. And bring beer, it's that kind of support group. - SWL

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August 22, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000812.html

http://www.sakaiproject.org/media2/2006/

altidemo06/altidemo06.htm



If you've ever tried to export a course from an existing CMS in a 'specifications-'compliant format you'll know that currently the best you can likely do is get the content as IMS Content Packages and hopefully the quizzes separately in IMS QTI format. Leaving the rest of the course (discussion forums, assignments, etc) embedded in the original location and needing to be recreated from scratch.



IMS COmmon Cartridge, recently demonstrated in action between Angel, Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT at the Alt-i-lab 2006 sessions, is the attempt to remedy this problem, to create a common standard for full course import and export between CMS and useful to publishers.



Above you can see a short video describing its promise and the effort that went in around it, and you can find out more about it on the IMS Working Group page. It is a worthy problem to solve because IMS CP just doesn't do the full job. Let's hope some lessons have been learned over the subsequent years since its advent and the support for Common Cartridge is more, let's say, even, than it has been for IMS CP. - SWL

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August 29, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000813.html

http://ccmixter.org/media/view/media/extras



Kind of a non-sequitar, but I have been working away listening to streams of fully CC-licensed remixes and tracks from the awesome CCMixter site all day, and just wanted to tell someone. What brought me there was the announcement that my old favourite, Freesound, is now integrated into ccMixter via the Sample Pool API. Ahh, CreativeCommons content - think "Organic," but for your brain ;-) - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000802.html

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ctt.bc.ca/landonline/



I am officially still on holidays until next Tuesday but made the mistake of checking my email (I have managed to abstain from my bloglines account though!) and through a mailing list I subscribe to saw a post on the nastiness that is Blackboard's patent application. If you can beat them, sue them, eh?



The ensuing effort to create a history of LMS/VLEs through Wikipedia is great and to be applauded. When I saw the posts about Blackboard's patent I immediately thought of our Edutools site, actually its predecessor, Landonline, developed by my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon and hosted by my former employers, the now defunct Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2).



Bruce originally created that site in 1996 (pre-Blackboard, in fact the early version was pre-WebCT as well.) I checked the Internet Archives, and while they don't have a copy from 1996, they do have ones from 1997, 1998 and 1999. If you have a look at the copies on the Wayback machine. The copies on the Wayback machine aren't pretty (lots of broken images) but you can see, for instance in this comparison from 1998, that Blackboard (here called Courseinfo) and WebCT show up in this apples to apples comparison with 4 other systems at the time.



It's not like Landonline/Edutools is the only example you can point to that was comparing Blackboard and WebCT to competing offerings - Marshall University's Center for Instructional Technology's comparison of LMS/CMS tools from 1999 is still available online, as is Virginia Tech's from 1998. What I do think is significant, however, is that at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one - certainly with changes and modifications over time, but it has been a relatively consistent point of comparison for almost 10 years now.



I am not a lwayer and don't play one on TV, and I am sure there is enough weasily language included in the patent that Blackboard will have some success using it to bludgeon competitors and customers alike. But if the creation of this behemoth didn't light a fire under your ass to do something different, maybe consider this a second opportunity to change course. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000798.html

http://video.google.com/

videosearch?q=type%3Agoogle%20engEDU

&page=1&lv=0&so=1



Bruce pointed me to a video of a talk by Barry Schwartz to staff at Google on "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less." (Worth a view - examines the idea that facing a plethora of choices, people act less, not more, that more choices has the paradoxical effect of inducing paralysis).



This led me to realize that Google is filming all of the talks of invited guest experts to their staff and posting them on Google Video for all to share. The topics range from the technically daunting (for me at least - "Multiview Geometry for Texture Mapping 2D Images onto 3D Range Data" oh my!) to the enlightening ("Impact of Technology on Reducing Poverty and Alleviating Social Issues in India"). Though I truly still hate this as a way to learn things, hard not to say "Good on ya" Google! - SWL

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August 31, 2006

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000814.html

http://www.educateinnovate.com/



OK, so at least they did post something back on August 7 about the patent (a staff member posting a letter on behalf of Michael Chasen, the CEO), but otherwise, the Blackboard "blog" has been thunderously silent given the amount of hoopla in the blogosphere over the last month directly concerning them.



Not really surprising, but also not what I'd call an "authentic" engagement with the concerns of their readers/customers. (And my reaction to the notes from their conference call with ALT in the UK is the same as Stephen's - apparently I've found another use for our stockpiled baby wipes now that our kids are out of diapers).



I did say that I was reserving judgement on the BB 'blog' until there was more to judge. Looks like the evidence is in, though, and on the charge of "falsely impersonating a blog" the evidence is based on the omissions as much as what is there. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000805.html

http://stu.dicio.us/



Thought I've been away I did try to catch up in Bloglines the last 2 days and I didn't see this making the rounds so hopefully of interest - stu.dicio.us, while still in beta, is an incredibly simple student-focused tool that currently supports note taking and scheduling, with file storage and self grade-tracking coming soon. There are three things about it that are really beautiful:



- it is REALLY simple, and yet quite useful. Try the note creation facility; it's a very nice web-based outliner that uses keyboard commands (more below)



- all class notes are shared (you have to agree to this to use the system). So not only does this create an ecology of class notes for individual classes (with basic 'tagging' principles in play as to how to identify a class, no heavyweight SIS-integration here) but by searching on certain terms you may find class notes from other classes, even from other institutions, around specific keywords (which does raise quality issues, but one assumes the developers could bring practices from other social softwares to bear here).



- based on the amazingly simple interface, I assume (though I couldn't find such an announcement on their site) that a prime target for the app will be cell phones/PDAs and other mobile devices.



So... a web-based, mobile-accessible site for students to store THEIR notes/information about THEIR studies, which simultaneously gives them access to other students' notes as well. So cool. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000804.html

http://www.kineo.co.uk/ideas/

future-of-e-learning-in-universities.html



http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0648.asp



At some point in the fall I have to dust off my crystal ball for a presentation on 'the future of LMS' (yikes!) so I've been keeping my eye on various 'Future of...' presentations of late, and recently came across these two.



The first, a report by Kineo and Intel, promises to be on the "Future of E-learning in Universities." While it looked promising, I found it ultimately pretty disappointing; fairly safe predictions on a very near future in which universities plod down the same CMS/VLE path of elearning with a little wireless thrown in for good measure. It's likely pretty accurate in the 2-3 year range, but uninspiring at best.



More interesting to me is the piece by Morton Egol in the latest Educause Review titled "The Future of Higher Education." While comparing these two articles is maybe a bit of apples-to-oranges, the vision he presents of "Community Learning Centres" is for me a far more interesting one to contemplate and seems to fit much better with some of the dissatisfactions with current models that I regularly hear grumbled in the edublogosphere. Undoubtedly many will be troubled with the vision of corporate entities entering the formerly public space of education, but (at least in the US and perhaps elsewhere) this burgeoning reality does need to be engaged with, as does the notion that K-12 represents a competitive threat to higher education. What!?! The argument goes that in the new model, "that with self-paced learning, thirteen years (K-12), including internships, provide ample learning to qualify for entry-level positions." If it seems unlikely, maybe contemplate the phenomenom of kids jumping from high school directly into professional athletics, which 25 years ago was unheard of. I heard a similar notion almost 10 years ago by the president of Mount Royal College who described the greatest threat to the College as not the neighboring colleges and universities but large corporate entities and commercial certification bodies that would take students direclty from high school and train them in the workforce.



Which brings me finally to the prognostication which I've recently enjoyed most, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information which I revisted over my holiday. I wanted to go back to the final chapter on 'Re-Education' (an earlier version of which can be found on the web in this paper titled 'Universities in the Digital Age.') While the book is now 6 years old, I think much of it holds up well, and the message (summed up by one reviewer as "it's the people, stupid"), especially in the education chapter, challenges the predominant "informational" picture of learning with a social one, tries to preserve the positive aspects of the university while asking what new forms 'degree granting bodies' could take, and I think also resonates really well with many of the dissatisfactions with the status quo apparent in the edublogosphere.



The caveats at the end of the chapter are well worth noting - it is entirely possible that higher ed institutions will prove to have more staying power than any of us could predict and survive the current digital revolution largely intact. But somehow this seems unlikely. For a while I've been carrying around the question of "what would a post-secondary institution that took seriously the disruptions poised by social software and emerging visions of learning (and the mass amaturization of everything) look like?" But after re-reading this book I'm wondering if I've framed that wrong; maybe the question is "how can we preserve the positive aspects of how higher education currently creates and shares knowledge while designing learning technologies that compliment, improve and expand that social formation?" - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000803.html

http://www.educause.edu/2006/10958



From the "that's not a zeitgeist, just a bump in the road" department comes this news, that the inaugural winner of the new Educause 'Catalyst' award is "Course Management Systems" (yes, the entire field of them, not just a signle one, competing claims to the contrary notwithstanding). What's so interesting, though, in light of those recent claims, is to read the text of the award which talks about CMS being "developed among faculty in pockets of innovation throughout the world" and that the "developers of these systems pulled together many strands of technology." [empasis mine] Indeed! - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000800.html

http://www.campus-technology.com/

news_article.asp?id=18864&typeid=155



This article is a follow up to one written 2 years ago by Frank Tansey's son, now a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound. It is of course purely anecdotal so its unfair to draw broad conclusions from it, but for me it provides a refreshing perspective on the issue.



The situation described seems to be very much a 'blended learning' or 'classroom augmented' use of a CMS (in this case Blackboard). The advantages seem to be along the lines that regular use of the CMS by instructors makes for more efficient, effective and engaged classroom work, and the biggest danger seems to be uneven use by faculty.



The recommendations reflect, unsurprisingly, an 'outsiders' view of how post-secondary institutions should work, giving far too much credit to the power of central authority and far too little responsibility on the shoulders of individual faculty (but then the decision making and management itself of the CMSes often naively perpetuates this mis-casting, as the LMS governance report I pointed to last week made clear.) Still well worth the quick read. - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000799.html

http://moodle.org/sites/index.php?country=all



Michael Penney wrote in to let me know that the map of Moodle deployments world-wide that I pined for earlier already exists. While I'm pretty sure this map is not an exact representation of the state of affairs (otherwise Alice Springs is surely the hotbed of all Moodle deployments, with New Orleans a close second) it does give you a sense of how truly spread across the globe the 13,000 or so adopters of Moodle are. (Michael also pointed me to the 'stats' pages, which display quite vividly Moodle's meteroic adoption curve.) - SWL

Posted by Scott Leslie | 0 comment(s)