Blackboard to Launch Learning Content Management and e-Portfolio System for Academic Market

I had heard talk recently of Blackboard entering the ‘content management’ marketplace, and the speaker was puzzled why they would want to do this. From the looks of there announcement, they are not necessarily trying to compete with your standard web content management system that serves your public web presence (thought it’s not clear that it couldn’t do that too) but instead taking the step to add learning content management in behind the course management and portal systems. Interesting to me, they seem to have made the move to consider students as just another potential set of content authors, and so the proposed technology to manage learning content also serves your e-portfolio and virtual hard drives for learners. Interesting strategy. – SWL

(As an aside, their attempts to ‘eat their own cooking’ are perhaps leaving them with indigestion – clicking on the ‘standards‘ link on the  right-hand side of the page reveals perhaps more than they wanted to of the content management structure. At least at 9:40 am PST)

Blackboard Announces Revenue of $22.6 Million For Second Quarter 2003

Just as David Carter-Tod mentioned in a comment on an earlier post about eCollege’s latest earnings statement, Blackboard has now come out with this revenue announcement and a statement about “positive cash flow.”

Maybe someone can explain the difference in the two announcements to me (I know that one of them, eCollege, is publicly traded and thus announces ‘earnings per share’ while Blackboard is still privately held, and thus will not) – does this announcement amount to being ‘profitable?’ Can you tell I get trounced in the stock market 😉 – SWL

The Defense Acquisition University Road Map for e-Learning

Fascinating document by an organization that evidently takes its planning very seriously. Like it or not, the American military is heavily involved with online training and one of the few organizations with the size to be a true market maker. This report is as interesting for its picture of the how the field will develop over the next 5-10 years as it is for how they plan to respond to those changes. I especially liked the two charts on pages 30 and 31 on “e-learning convergence ‘lagging inidcators’.” – SWL

– from a list of reports at [The Masie Centre]

Latest CETIS briefing on IMS specifications

This latest in the CETIS series of briefings about e-learning interoperability standards deals with IMS Simple Sequencing. This is the fifth such briefing, the others having focused on the IMS Enterprise, LIP, Content Package and QTI specifications. If you haven’t seen these yet, they are highly recommended; short (typically 2-3 pages) comprehensible descriptions that explain these specifications from the perspective of what they enable. – SWL

– via [CETIS: Standards in Education Technology]

AltaVista Releases Toolbar

This isn’t directly an educational technology issue, but the Google toolbar has become such a major part of many web searchers interfaces that this might be generally of interest. In addition to many of the now expected search features (constrained catalogues, multimedia searches) the toolbar also allows you to search zip codes, area codes and use the babelfish translation service). – SWL

– via [ResourceShelf]

CADE 2003 Photos and Proceedings now online

Very quietly both the proceedings and some images from the last conference for the Canadian Association of Distance Educators (CADE) have been posted to their site. At least it was quiet to me as I had to find out about it by finding a copy of my own paper whilst googling for a good K-12 course management site (anyone??). Luckily, now that I’ve found this I can forever cherish this photo of me talking to the elearning guru 😉

(Michelle, you thought we were joking about getting groupie shots at Merlot eh?)

Open Source Portfolio code released

I’m sure this is not news to anyone actively working on portfolio projects, but it just came across my desk. Apparently the OSPI project released their source code on July 30th.

“Formed in January 2003, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a collaborative, open-source, software development project based on the University of Minnesota Enterprise System’s electronic portfolio software. The initial OSPI core group, consisting of the University of Minnesota (U of MN), University of Delaware, and the r-smart group, founded this collaborative to open the evolution of the U of MN ePortfolio to diverse input, rapid development, and widespread use.”

An online demo of the current system is available. There is promise that the next version will be both IMS and OKI compliant. – SWL

– via a private email from [Bruce Landon]

Reading blogs on your Palm

As I noted in an earlier post, I bought myself a Palm M130 as a present to myself in starting my new life as an independant consultant. It’s my first PDA and I went for the cheapest model I could afford that was still expandable and offered a decent colour screen. I had resisted getting one for a long time, but finally broke down and got one, not least of which was because I’ve been involved with discussions about website accessibility for too long not to actually try and access websites through an alterrnate device. I’ve used Jaws and other screen readers, but never a PDA or cell phone, and I like to walk the talk when I can.

So given that I blog pretty regularly one of my early experiments has been to figure out how I can read my RSS subscriptions on my PDA, and further on down the road how I can also write to my blog as well. I had actually investigated the reading issue a bit before for my old Director at C2T2 as I thought that getting him the ability to read blogs through a handheld aggreagtor might help him grok the whole issue a little better. That investigation didn’t yield a lot, but I thought it was just because of the prefunctory effort I had put into it.

Well, it turns out it wasn’t my lack of effort that led to such scant findings. Unlike the world of desktop RSS aggregators, it’s a different story on the Palm OS.  So far the majority of solutions I have found have been built upon an offline page reader engine for the Palm called Plucker. One solution would be to simply point plucked at the homepages of the blogs one reads and suck these on to your handheld on schedule every day. I tried this and as a hack it worked adequately, though one has to fiddle with some of the settings to make the pages more lightweight (turning the graphics off) and you still have to muddle through extraneous site navigation.

Better than this approach was Blogpluck, a blog-specific Plucker page builder developed with the jpluck engine, itself a java-based plucker page builder. This comes much closer to the experience of reading one’s feeds on a desktop-based aggregator. The software understands the RSS format and so can present you with an index view of each of your feeds with just the titles, which act as links to the full article. The bad news is the current blogpluck client is no longer supported – the good news is that it is no longer supported because it’s functionality is being rolled into the larger jpluck 2.0 client, current in its 14th pre-release.

Finally, all this searching for a good PDA-based RSS reader also led me to find a very nice front-end tool for creating Plucker pages called FlingIt. Essentially a ‘bookmarklet’ type application for sending pages from your web browser to your PDA, FlingIt was built by and for educators and students by the good folks at the Hi-CE (Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education at the University of Michigan), itself well worth a detailed look for all of the resources it collects together on the use of handhelds to support education. – SWL

Blackboard and SCT integration

Via Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes news of the announcement that a certain amount of integration between SCT Banner and Blackboards CMS will now be available through the use of some connector technology from the recent SCT acquisition Campus Pipeline. This is definitely of interest in and of itself, but the article is well worth a read for anyone wanting a good overview of the field of SIS/CMS integration. To be fair, it is still fairly early days (we’ve only been promised this sort of interoperability for 5 years or so) but we are still yet to see the full promise of standards-based interoperability come to fruition. Someday. – SWL