OSS Watch – UK-based Open SOurce Advisory Service from JISC

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/

Via another great article from Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes mention of this new service, Open Source Software Watch (OSS Watch), aimed at providing “neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software” to the U.K.’s higher education community. They are not focusing on a single type of open source application, but rather the gamut that can be found in the open source world, which makes a lot of sense as the issues in adopting any particular piece of open source software share much in common. This is a welcome addition to the service from OpenSector the news service which focuses more broadly on open source as it applies to the public sector.

Take a look, too, at the ‘style’ links at the bottom of the page – nicely built standards-compliant website that allows you to view the page in multiple formats at the click of a button (my guess would be by using the Cocoon engine). – SWL

Presentations from Library conference on “Metadata and Institutional Repositories”

http://www.rlg.org/events/haveandhold2003/index.html

Nice follow up to the Research Library Group’s sessions back in May this year. I would highlight both the “Mixing and matching” sessions which deal with implementing multiple metadata standards and multiple repository systems, as well as the presentations dedicated to selecting and implementing the open source Fedora system as worth a read. – SWL

KnowledgeAgora – public interface to CanLOM database

http://www.knowledgeagora.com/subjects/index.cfm

I’m sure someone on the Edusource project would know more about this (maybe Stephen, since it does seem to be in his backyard). On the surface, it doesn’t look a lot different than the old Telecampus Online Course Directory, though drilling down into the subject menus reveals that the contents are not identical. – SWL

Report Comparing VLE Issues and Uses in the UK between 2001 and 2003

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/tlig/vle/vle2003.pdf

This report by Tom Browne and Martin Jenkins is a follow up to one done in 2001. While the survey is very much couched in the language and context of U.K. higher education, results concerning typical support models, decision-making models, and build-buy decisions are likely of general interest. One point to note: over the course of the 2 year period covered by these reports, Blackboard lept ahead of WebCT in adoption in the U.K., and the two large commercial vendors continue to dominate the landscape. But the report did find an interesting contrasting development – an increase in the number of ‘intranet-based’ and in-house systems, as well as an increase in the number of institutions supprting 2 different VLEs. – SWL

Sentient Discover integration with WebCT or Blackboard

http://www.publictechnology.net/modules.php?the announcement
op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=316

As if to confirm some points from Martha Whitehead’s paper below, that there is a growing availability of means to integrate library systems with CMS, this press release announces news of integration plans for this U.K.-based “learning resource management system” with both WebCT and Blackboard (though this press release points only to the WebCT announcement).

Even more interesting perhaps is that Sentient’s Discover product is also starting to bridge the world of library collections and learning object repositories; its 2.0 version, to be released in January, will allow users to retrieve results from both their institutional library catalogue and the MERLOT metadata repository in the same search. – SWL

Paper on CMS & Libraries

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/martha/
archives/000580.html

From Michelle comes reference to both this useful paper and a new blog by her colleague, Martha Whitehead, the Head of Information Services at the University of British Columbia Library. The paper is a brief summary of some of the issues and progress made to date to bring library systems, and the services librarians have to offer, into the insitutional elearning/CMS mix. Contains a useful bibliography of citations on this issue. – SWL

‘Life and Death Simulations’ and PureWar

Reading Jay Cross’ recent post about military simulations at the 25th annual Interservice/Industry Training Simulation & Education Conference, I was immediately reminded of a favourite critical theorist of mine from days gone by, Paul Virilio. I seem to remember always feeling like I was in a fugue state while reading Virilio, only ever half comprehending, never certain if it was all just highly verbose malarky or true prophecy, or both. But as I get older and the world gets inexorably stranger, concepts like his Pure War seem less like theoretical conceits, and more like a statement of affairs. What does this have to do with educational technologies? Lots, unfortunately … – SWL

New digital usage dashboard for WebCT

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000593.html

ATTENTION WEBCT ADMINISTRATORS!

I’ve been waiting a few weeks to tell people about this one since I saw it demo’d at the BC Ed Tech Users Group meetings, but promised Michelle that I wouldn’t post on it before her (since she’s the one that works at UBC, and not me.)

The folks at UBC (the original home of WebCT) have developed a set of scripts that mine the usage data and a few other variables in the WebCT database and give a system-wide picture of how the system is being used, and more importantly, allows you to anticipate the kind of usage coming down the pipe by looking at the scheduled tests and quizzes across the board. This is invaluable – for the first time within this system one can get a heads-up if 5,000 users are about to crash your server at the same time to take their Chem 101 test, while another 3,000 happen to be scheduled to take a Biology exam the same morning. And as you’d expect from a place that’s obviously in the know, there’s an RSS feed for this data!

Don’t be put off by the Flintbox site Michelle points to – the scripts are being offered for free, even though there appears to be a small registration process (and ominous talk of ‘patents’ and ‘licensing’) to wade through before you can grab it. – SWL

A few ‘new’ edublogs

Last week Alan was lamenting the seeming dissappearance of a number of formerly prolific edubloggers. I too had wondered where many people had disappeared to, though I seem to recall from my days ‘inside’ the institution that November and December can be particularly hectic times.

In the spirit of widening the circle, here’s a few other educational bloggers I have stumbled on to recently, and that I haven’t seen mentioned widely yet:

In particular I would highlight the first two, Brian Alger’s and Gord McKenzie’s, as so far containing lots of thought provoking material.

And as has been pointed out a number of times, one of the beauties of RSS is the ability to be notified of activity on a blog that has otherwise been inactive simply by keeping a subscription to their feed in your aggregator. The way I manage that in bloglines is to create a folder titled ‘Dormant’ so that I can keep track of blogs that do not seem to be posting regularly anymore. – SWL

Blackboard going Public?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A33240-2003Dec3.html

Via Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update comes a link to this article speculating on the possibility that Blackboard will go public sometime in the near future. I remember being disappointed before the bubble burst that they hadn’t IPO’d, as they seemed a good candidate at the time. In retrospect they are looking like geniuses now – missed having their market capitalization decimated and grew the company to where it has real profits. – SWL