Author: sleslie

IADIS 2004 Conference – Web Based Communities

http://www.iadis.org/wbc2004/committees.asp

I don’t normally blog conference announcements, but this one seemed pretty interesting. The International Association for Development of the Information Society has put out a call for papers for it’s upcoming conference, to be held March 25-26, 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal, on the theme of ‘web based communities.’ As they say on the conference home page, the goal “is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-based Communities.” Portugal in March, hmmm, I can think of worse places to be. – SWL

The Best-Selling Dissertations of 2002

One likely can’t make too much out of this, but I thought it interesting that 3 of the top 10 ‘best selling’ dissertations (as reported by Proquest) related to knowledge management. If you set your filter a little broader, you might even say that about half of these related to learning within organizations. – SWL

-via [ResourceShelf]

AAHE Portfolio Program Search

A searchable database of 51 institutions using electronic portfolios courtesy of the American Association of Higher Education (note this is the same resource that used to be hosted by Kalamazaoo College at http://www.kzoo.edu/pfolio/database.html). Found it via the Kalamazoo site, which also contains this useful biliography relating to e-portfolios, as well as their own portfolio site. – SWL

Jay Cross’ Notes on LMS presentation by Bryan Chapman (from Brandon Hall group)

Jay Cross is blogging the VNU Supplier Summit. There are lots of nuggets in his notes, and of particular interest to me was the session by Bryan Chapman, an LMS analyst with Brandon Hall, who had some numbers associated with average LMS license prices.
Continue reading “Jay Cross’ Notes on LMS presentation by Bryan Chapman (from Brandon Hall group)”

Proceedings of the OLN Institute –

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/
michelle/archives/000194.html

Via Michelle Lamberson comes mention of an important collection of papers on learning objects that came out of the recent OLN Institute at Ohio State called “Building and Assessing Shareable Content.” The proceedings for the conference, a book titled “Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections” (Catherine M. Gynn and Stephen R. Acker, Editors) are now available online.

Continue reading “Proceedings of the OLN Institute –”

Freeing computers in schools: Free software in education

http://www.opensector.org/1063723220

Another piece similar to the one I posted on yesterday concerning the relevance of Free and Open Source software to education. It focuses even more so on its relevance to developing nations, and points to an excellent report by Niranjan Rajani on behalf of the Finnish government that also has details of the progress of open source in  Africa, Asia and South America. – SWL

– via [Open Sector]

http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/LINUX/
document/quatrequarts.html

This paper by Thomas De Praetere of the Université cathlolique de Louvain in France, the original home of Claroline, puts forward some arguments on why open source is so successful, particularly in educational institutions. I know this might surprise some – I’ve had many educators complain to me about their inability to get open source in the door of their institution – yet I believe what this paper claims is true, that the ‘education sector’ is still one of the greatest contributors and adopters for open source, and given the inverse trend of institutional funding levels to licensing costs, will likely remain so. The article is in French, but the google translation’s not too bad. – SWL 

Government gives One Million Euros towards Claroline development

http://www.claroline.net/news.php#28

This summer Claroline released version 1.4 which has many new features, not least of which is an ever expanding list of languages it supports. Their credits page also has the look of an open source CMS project that is actually taking off! This recent announcement of additional investment is great news for this project, and for open source CMS in general. – SWL

Pathways to Philosophy Distance Learning Program

http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/index.html

The home page for this ‘open education’ program had a number of elements that made me take note. One is the ‘Letters to my former students‘ in which the instructor has constructed a kind of FAQ section based on the responses he’s written to student emails over the past 6 years of teaching the course. Another is the archive of student essays, exhibiting exemplary work from past years. While there may be some privacy issues at stake regarding the publishing student work, it would seem that the work of previous classes is one obvious source of materials in building up both a program’s knowledge base, as well as its set of examples of how people have come to learn the materials previously. – SWL