Educause Evolving Technology Committe Report on Open Source LMS

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/DEC0602.pdf

There’s nothing really wrong with this report but also nothing very exciting either – basically a short synopsis of Sakai and Moodle and the state of affairs in LMS adoption in the US. If I were one of the 50 or so other open source learning management system projects out there I might be a bit choked by the continued lack of recognition (and it certainly gives pause to claims I’ve seen made within the open source CMS community that there’s no inherent competition between open source projects) but if you need a short synopsis document on the topic to stick in front of a still skeptical CIO, this is one place to start. – SWL

NoteMesh – another student-centric note taking service

http://www.notemesh.com/?a=home

Along the same lines as stud.icio.us, which I wrote about last month, NoteMesh is driven by students and creates wikispaces for an entire class to take notes in. I actually much prefer the stu.dicio.us model, in which each student is taking their own notes but the class ‘tags’ create a collective note space, over this one, where instead students collaborate on one set of notes for the entire class. If I’m understanding correctly, this is partly the distinction Stephen was getting at in his recent whiteboard drawing. Still, encouraging to see the being aimed directly at the student taking control over their own knowledge creation processes rather than having to be always mediated through instituional infrastructure. – SWL

Report on “Organization for Open Source Software”

http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/oss

This extensive paper funded by the Mellon and Hewlitt foundations (amongst others) is an important read. It looks at the adoption of open source in higher education (in the US) and the need for an organizing body that could address “uncertainty about future support for and improvements in the software” and supply coordination to prevent “wasteful duplication both of development efforts and of governance structures.” Sounds sensible enough, right?

The case made here for adoption of open source in higher ed seems strong and unassailable, and the scope is not just ‘educational’ software like LMS but all aspects of higher ed infrastructure, things like SIS, Library OPACs and Financial Aid systems.

Here’s where my wordy wrestling with the issues would usually go. Too busy. Suffice to say – the issue of ‘freedom’ is as tantamount here as it’s been recently noted elsewhwere, and while my first reaction is to bristle against some of the seemingly artificial constructs these organizations would engender, those might be small concessions compared to the freedoms from commercial licensing fees, patents and the like that I think honestly motivate initiatives like this. – SWL

Note: The original reference was from Lorcan Dempsey’s always insightful blog. Read his original post for a much better synopsis and questions about the report.

Campus 2020 Think Pieces – Envisioning Post-Secondary Education in BC 15 years out

http://www.campus2020.ca/EN/411/

It’s pretty easy as a Canadian to become jaded about the various reports, commisions and inquiries that our various levels of government sponsor. We’ve had no end of profound studies and reports that seemed to accurately identify both the ills and possible solutions on things like Aboriginal Self-Government or the Concentration of Media Ownership and yet years later see no real improvement on these matters (and yes, to be fair, those are both Federal examples).

So you’ll be excused if you look on this exercise sponsored by the B.C. government to help “shape the vision, mission, goals and objectives of B.C.’s post-secondary system for the next 10 to 20 years” with some skepticism. I know it’s my first inclination.

And yet I am encouraged in reading some of the first things to come out of the initiative, the Think Pieces on topics like “E-Learning and Beyond” and the truncation found in our institutional landscapes between types of knowing.

The e-learning piece is the one I paid closest attention to so far, and it at least hits all the right notes, urging a move towards ‘elearning 2.0,’ which they characterize as having an “architecture of participation.” I’m sure someone will find fault with this paper, but it seems to me that if we don’t move in that direction as a provincial system, it won’t be because a picture of what could be wasn’t painted, by people officially asked to do so. They even go further than I think many ‘think pieces’ would in offering a set of ‘internal review questions’ in Appendix 2 for educators and administrators to use examine their current technology implementation and adoption practices. It’s a good read. Let’s hope we can all make the follow on a reality. – SWL

Moodle OCW Module

http://metasolutions.us/resources/moodle/mods/
ocw_metamod.php

So I usually don’t “blog on demand” but when Michael Penney emails me stuff it’s almost always worth a post, and this time is no exception (and totally by chance it turns out I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with the developers in November). As it says on the site, “OCW MetaMod for Moodle provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual resources or activities in a Moodle course as ‘shared’ (allowing guest viewing) or ‘private’ (only visible for registered students). Additionally, the MetaMod tags resources and activities as ‘C’ (copyright) or ‘CC’ (Creative Commons/Copyright Cleared).” This is a great step forward in enabling easy sharing of resources, allowing instructors to do it right from where the resource has been used.

As Michael wrote “Despite Mr. Small, the beat goes on…:-)” speaking of whom, the next chapter is slowly unfolding. – SWL

Library Mashup Competition Winners

http://www.talis.com/tdn/forum/84

I am currently participating in a cool exercise in prognostication on emerging technologies and learning and one of my votes/pleas for a disruptive technology in the academy is “mashups” (which I realize aren’t properly a specific “technology” so much as a technique, but whatever.)

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled on Jenny Levine’s post on the Talis Library Mashup competition. The full list of entries is here, and while it feels a bit tame, it is definitely a start. The library seems definitely like one of the potential on-campus sources to be mashed up. What are the others? Well, to serve as the basis for a mashup, on my read at least, you need to be providing 2 things; some data and a way to get at it (an API, web service/XML feeds, screenscraping, or other mechanism for access, the more public the better). And there’s the rub, it seems. While more and more Web2.0 companies (holy cow – 291 on this list) are offering APIs that are being mashed up (arguably often with a still-unknown value proposition) is your IS department publishing the API for your SIS on your campus website? You CMS? Why would they do this? Well, that’s the other side of the mashup phenomenom – often-times the companies making their data available don’t yet know all the ways it could be used, but appear to be correct in the belief that if you publish it, it will get used, often in unexpected or improved ways.

It’s likely the sources on campus that will serve mashups anytime soon aren’t the “enterprise” systems but departmental or discipline-based ones (various GIS-based systems seem ripe to combine the Google and Yahoo maps of the world; text collections with things like Yahoo’s term extraction service, etc). And I don’t want to trivialize the challenges to security and privacy in accessing some of the enterprise data. But right now it feels like a brick wall – ask and you’ll get a strong ‘No’; not a considered one but the idea just rejected out of hand. But you know the trick; keep asking, eventually you’ll wear them down (or they’ll retire 😉 – SWL

Creative Commons Images and Watermarks

Mark at eClippings recently re-posted this image from Dion Hinchcliffe. The image itself is interesting, but what struck me was that it had the Creative Commons condition icons and the source URL embedded in the image itself at the bottom. I’m calling this a watermark but I may be using the term incorrectly.

When I saw this I was torn. On the one hand my first reaction was – hey, that’s a great idea, remove any ambiguity about the rights associated with the image regardless of where it ends up, and also clear up how it is to be attributed by including it’s original URL. If you buy into the argument that lack of clarity about rights and the hardship of clearing rights is a major inhibitor to the reuse of digital resources then it seems to make sense, right?

On the other hand, I can see arguments to the effect that such marks could be a hinderance to reuse (if done in an ugly way that mars the original image or if they take away from the re-users contribution to the remix). And if they are such a great idea, why aren’t we seeing this more often. There are already lots of scripts out there to automate watermarking of images, and it would be simple to offer these as a service that people could tie into. But is this a good idea?

I have self-interested reasons for asking this question. Within my work on SOL*R I have to advise content authors on how to display either a Creative Commons or BC Commons license in their work. My reply has always been “Hey, they’re your rights and it’s your content, so if you feel strongly about people respecting these, assert them as often as you like.” The funny thing is the issue isn’t people wanting to use license tags excessively, its people not wanting to use them at all because they haven’t included them up front on a template or the like.

So, is this practice one to encourage? Should we instead use XMP for this (and build apps that automatically just add it in without extra work from the user)? Or leave well enough alone? Feedback (through email, as my overworked butt has still not migrated this to WordPress as promised) always appreciated. – SWL

educate/innovate = use patents?

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

CCMixter Radio – Rockin’ the airwaves with Creative Commons music, 24 hours a day!

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

Short Video on Common Cartridge

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