Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
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
http://toomolfileserv.bangor.ac.uk/ – temporary URL – will be found at http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk
after November 17
Just announced on the JISC VLE list is this valuable resource for campuses undertaking large-scale integration efforts.
Continue reading “MLE INfokit”
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”
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”
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:
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
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
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”
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
http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2003/9/24/1396.asp
“The California State University system has adopted the Blackboard Learning System and the Blackboard Portal System to meet the e-Education needs of more than 414,000 students and 46,000 faculty and staff.”
Wow. There have been quite a few large CMS RFPs and competitions over the last year (Wisconsin, Minnesota, MiCTA to name a few) but California’s always the biggie. I seem to think, though, that this announcement is more a formalization of something that had already been happening at many of the campuses concerned, and so maybe isn’t quite the coup it first sounds to be. – SWL
– via [Online Learning Update]
http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.goodfellow/Euroc03/talk.htm
This is the text of the keynote speech at the recent European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning in Limerick, Ireland. The speech is by Dr. Robin Goodfellow (no, not that other guy) of the UK Open University. It’s longish but I found it worth the read, in part because there were lots of useful references to be picked up along the way. And I must say that where the paper ends up got the cultural theorist in me stirred up a bit
“Thus we arrive at the conclusion that the literacies of online learning environments, for all the revolutionary and progressive claims, continue to be constructed by, and in turn to construct, the discourses and forms of social action of the embodied world, in particular of the institutions, corporations, schools, colleges, and universities, very largely English-speaking and technology-owning, in whose interests the globalisation of education is proceeding”
It’s pretty easy not to talk about these issues. Much harder to not just ‘go along.’ I’m mostly berating myself on this point. It’s 3 in the morning. Good night. – SWL