Author: sleslie

New Book – Online Education and Learning Management Systems

http://www.studymentor.com/studymentor/

From eLearning Eclectic comes mention of this new book by Morten Flate Paulsen which brings the Scadanavian perspective on “Online Education and Learning Management Systems.” This is of particular interest because, in addition to being the original home of possibly the largest open source iniative, Linux, Scandanavian countries have also produced a number of very good elearning environments (MimerDesk and FLE3 to name two) that very much challenge the more content-focused paradigm that seems to predominate in many of the systems that have originated from North America. Short snippets of the work are available online but one must pay to get either the hard copy or an electronic version. – SWL

Logicampus – new open source CMS

http://www.logicampus.com/

New open source CMS that was the result of a joint project between Tap Internet and Tarrant County College in Texas. The PHP-based system is quite full featured and will be quickly comprehensible by anyone who has used any of the more ‘content-focused’ style CMS.

Note I have added this to the ongoing list of open source course management systems, which has moved from its previous location. It can now be found as a wiki page at http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/OpenSourceCourseManagementSystems

‘Blogs in Education’ roundtable discussion topics

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/
etug_roundtable/roundtable_discussion_topics.htm

Tomorrow the B.C. Ed Tech Users Group gets together for its bi-annual face to face sessions. I’m hosting a short half-hour discussion on blogs in education, in part as a follow up to the online ‘blogtalk’ we did back in October. The roundtables are just supposed to be loose discussions but I threw together two possible topics, as well as pointers to a few examples of higher ed class blogs that I like. If anyone has comments on pointers to where these discussions have already taken place online (specifically the ‘inside or outside the firewall’ one) I’d love to hear them.

The only problem with doing this roundtable is that I’m going to miss the other ones that are going on at the same time, most notably Brian’s on wikis in education. As always, feel free to re-use if there’s anything useful here.- SWL

Timeline and Discussion Extraction Tools from UBC

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000545.html

Michelle Lamberson has a note about two really interesting tools recently released by the instructional technology support folks at UBC’s Faculty of Arts. The first is a forms-based Flash Timelines builder. The second a tool to extract and then re-import distinct pieces of threaded discussions from inside WebCT. – SWL

Camp CLOE blog

http://learnware.uwaterloo.ca/projects/cloe/bulletin/

CLOE is the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange, an Ontario-wide LOR. Camp CLOE was a 5 day workshop they ran last spring for representatives from the 17 partner institutions. They’ve set this ‘blog’ up in support of the cohort from that session. I say ‘blog’ in quotes as it seems a bit sporadic and not overly personal, but the terminology isn’t important – it seemed like a nice albeit small attempt to keep some of the momentum going for a group of learners after the flush of the f2f workshops had passed. – SWL

CETIS on SAKAI

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20031124150257

Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has a lot more information on the proposed SAKAI project that I posted on last week. As reported, it’s a collaboration by a number of the former OKI participants in conjunction with folks from uPortal and introducing work around the JSR 168 Portlet specification. As Wilbert writes, “SAKAI is meant to come up with production level application almost within a year.” – SWL

Quotes

It’s going to be a slow day here at EdTechPost, so….

“Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure.” – The Mishnah

“The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” – Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

Pointers to Elearning Glossaries

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/ELearningGlossaries

As part of the background research for the Edutools project I am constantly on the lookout for new elearning glossaries with which to compare definitions of terms. Here is a list of the ones I know about (in a wiki, so feel free to add if you want) – most of them are generic ‘elearning’ glossaries though there are a few specific to ‘metadata’ and ‘learning objects’ here too. – SWL

ULIST – elearning Web Services Interfaces directory?

http://www.ulist.org/index.htm

This is one of those accidental finds that ended up seeming highly relevant but for which I have no background info and really don’t know if it’s real or not. As the site says “ULIST is a website where Web Services interfaces for learning, training and related applications can be exposed for comment and evaluation and where organizations that require Web Services integration of multiple functions can go to find relevant Web Services interfaces.” The contact email address is from the QuestionMark.com domain, which seems plausible – to me it makes sense for a 3rd party tool builder like Questionmark to champion something this. There are no entries in the directory yet and almost no links to it from the outside world – this seems to be a bit of a proof of concept at this point; still, interesting. – SWL