The recombinant library: portals and people

http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/dempsey/
dempsey_recombinant_library.pdf

I love papers on portals that begin by thoroughly trashing the word ‘portal,’ as my experience has been that it is one of the most unuseful pieces of modern tech jargon.

But this paper takes the conflation of the meanings of the word portal as its starting point and explores it to rich effect. Although it’s written by and for librarians, one of the reason the paper’s so effective is in arguing that approaching portals from the library’s perspective is precisely the wrong end to come at it; you need to approach it from the user’s perspective. Well worth reading for anyone involved in campus-wide portal initiatives. – SWL

– via [ResourceShelf]

Hands-on Segue Demo Available

http://www.opensourcecms.com/
modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=74

There’s been a little buzz over the last few months about using blogs as replacements for CMS, and this open source example from Middlebury College is sometimes held up as an example. So I was happy to see that you can get administrator access to a hands on demo through the invaluable OpenSourceCMS site. Thanks to Charlie for the post reminding me to keep going back to this site. – SWL

Perseus Blog Survey Results Unsurprising

http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/

This one is quickly making the rounds. It would be easy to criticize this survey (only focuses on hosted services, and even then excludes, for instance, the radio.weblogs.com sites) but I actually think their findings would be generally supported if you widened the set of sites and software you looked at. It is entirely unsurprising to me that there is a huge abadonment rate with new blogs – how many times have you downloaded a piece of software simply to check it out, especially ones that are free or have free trials? Same goes for the finding that ‘active’ blogs are on avergae not that active. Creating a blog site’s not hard – regularly maintaining an interesting blog, now that’s a bit more of a challenge!
Continue reading “Perseus Blog Survey Results Unsurprising”

JISC Study of Managed Learning Environment Activity

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/project_mle_activity.html

Recently (August 2003) published report on the state of affaris in the U.K. around Managed Learning Environments (MLEs).

My understanding of MLEs – whereas the Brits speak of ‘virtual learning environments’ (or VLEs) as roughly the equivalent of what we call ‘course management systems,’ MLEs are more like what you get when you add in single sign on, access to a student information system, potentially a portal system and any number of other integrated student service technologies. (Somewhat unsurprisingly, they reported that “the term ‘MLE’ is rarely if ever used, although a general and shared understanding of its definition is common. Within institutions, systems are considered primarily from a functional perspective…”)
Continue reading “JISC Study of Managed Learning Environment Activity”

Welcome to the newly designed EdTechPost

There’s still lots to do, but for a number of reasons I needed to finally get this out the door today. It may not look that different, but to get this going I’ve:

  • moved from using Radio as my blogging tool to using MoveableType
  • changed web hosts, and got myself a brand-spanking new URL
  • redesigned the site, both visually and through the use of CSS

There’s still some kinks to work out in the style sheet implementations (I hadn’t quite realized how truly inconsistent the interpretation of “standards” is still across browsers) so please be patient. If you do notice anything going truly squirrelly for you, please let me know. There’s also still a good deal of work to try and re-direct traffic from the old site to here, but from here on I will be publishing strictly to this server/this url/this RSS feed. So welcome! – SWL

Syllabus Article on TrackBack

http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8284

o.k., I suppose it’s nice to see blogs as well as complimentary technologies like trackback getting more prominence in the academic press, but does anyone know where Phillip D. Long’s blog is? Oh, here it is … but maybe there’s another one lurking around somewhere else. That’s probably not fair (but I’m grouchy this morning) – MIT seems to actually have quite the blog support site set up. – SWL

E-learning Competency Centre’s Learning Objects Competition Website

E-learning Competency Centre’s Learning Objects Competition Website

Stephen pointed to this ongoing competition site as a chance to view a fair number of learning objects in one place. More than that, these are all what you would call “rich” multi-media objects, most often done in Authorware or Flash, with each typically covering a distinct ‘unit’ of learning.
Continue reading “E-learning Competency Centre’s Learning Objects Competition Website”

WebCT Vista demonstrates Open Knowledge Initiative support

http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=18218512

“In the demonstration, the WebCT Vista academic enterprise system automatically synchronized calendars with Microsoft Outlook using the OKI authentication and scheduling OSIDs, or APIs, to exchange data. This would enable both calendars to be simultaneously updated by updating one.”

This probably doesn’t seem like much, but in theory the promise held by widespread OKI OSID support is much greater. If such support were to be found in even a couple of the major CMS players (as well as one or two viable open source projects,) the barrier to entry for discipline-specific or pedagogic-specific application developers suddenly gets much lower, as they can focus on their application’s core functionality and not on re-building it to work with each of the different proprietary APIs. It’s perhaps unfortunate, though, that they chose the application they did to illustrate their implementation of the OSIDs. – SWL