Author: sleslie

Web Based Learning resources library

An *extensive* organized collection of web links, articles and the like on all things ‘web learning-‘ related. I can’t find out anything about the author or company that hosts the site. I wonder how things like this manage to float beneath the radar. For me, as someone who is always trying to unearth new, unfound or obscure applications in relatively narrow product categories like elearning authoring tools or synchronous classroom tools, a site like this is invaluable. no idea how often it is maintained. – SWL

CHEST – VLE Comparison Grid

Another small comparison site from CHEST, a software license clearinghouse for educational institutions in the U.K.  They compare five products,

  •  Blackboard Learning System
  • FD Learning Ltd
  • LearnWise
  • Teknical Virtual Campus
  • WebCT Campus Edition Pilot

Their ‘all -by-all’ comparison grid uses the following features, mostly focused on licensing and cost implications, as the basis of comparison compares

  • Product description
  • Type of licence
  • Users/Location and use permissions
  • Rights issues
  • Hosted services
  • Requirements
  • Product support
  • Standards and specification
  • Cost of product
  • Cost of training IT staff Other staff
  • Cost of maintenance and support (on site hosting)
  • Cost of maintenance and support (off site hosting)
  • Other support services

Welcome to JudyBrown.com

When I grow up, I want to be just like Judy Brown. Judy is the “Emerging Technology Analyst in the Office of Learning and Information Technology (OLIT) at the University of Wisconsin System Administration.” Cool. “Emerging Technology Analyst,” how does one get a job like that? – SWL

Technology Based Training – an overview of authoring systems & learning management systems available in the UK

A bit dated (2001) but still a not bad source for overview info on a large number of CMS/LMSes. This is out of Technologies for Training (TfT), a “national information and advisory service, developed on behalf of the Department for Education and Employment.” I am always interested in seeing stuff from the U.K. and Europe as they definitely have some different systems on their radar, and there appears, at least to this naive eye, to be more discussions about different pedagogical models and a consciousness about the connection between pedagogical models, technology adoption and power. But that’s for another day … – SWL

E-Learning Standards Book Site

This is absolutely not an endorsement – I haven’t read this book and have no idea how good its contents are. But it was interesting to stumble across this (again trying to confirm Learnwise’s SCROM status). They have an extensive collection of links on e-learning standards (http://www.elearning-standards.com/links.htm) and their news page seems to draw from the news pages of the major standards initiatives, so it, along with the CETIS site, are probably good places to start for anyone intent on closely monitoring the latest news releases from the various groups. – SWL 

Managed Learning Enviroments for Further Education Conference – Stirling University.

I found this site during the course of researching the Granada Learnwise product for edutools.info and trying to ascertain whether their claims of SCORM compliance were factual. They use different terminology in the U.K. and this site deals specifically with Managed Learning Environments (MLEs), which I take to be systems in which the CMS and Administrative SIS have been tightly integrated, possibly also including an LCMS (but this later part is not clear, to me at least). In any case, the site contains vendor-supplied responsesto a number of questions from Learnwise, THINQ, WebCT, Blackboard, Digitalbrain, FD Learning, PiSYS, SABA, My Knowledge Map, and MDC learning Systems. It is great when customers and education systems publish information like this as it gives me (and presumably CMS purchasers doing sue dilligence) another third-party source to verify some of the vendor claims. – SWL

Resources comparing different forms of computer mediated communication?

(I’m not really expecting this post to generate any answers, as this site still isn’t quite ready for prime time – I rushed it out the door to fulfil a portfolio requirement for a job I had applied to. Still, I like the idea of posting questions to one’s blog (rather than findings or opinions) as potentially the audience could be quite distributed, diverse, and unknown to you. this last part is probably one of the more fascinating aspects of blogs and knowledge building/collective intelligence. I guess the old time Usenet newsgroups were similar in being able to ask a question to a large audience you didn’t know, but even there you did some pre-selection in the groups you were posting to. Maybe some of the community sites offer similar functionality. Anyways, I digress)

 A colleague sent me an email asking if I had any references he could cite to pieces that argue for the use of web-based discussion forums over email-based mailing lists. My first reaction was to email him my opinion that these shouldn’t be an either/or question, and that the best solutions allowed one to use either mechanism to interact with a discussion. And I am very much a believer in this – it first became clear to me when I saw the hypermail interface to majordomo, and probably should have clicked earlier simply based on how Usenet worked – one could interact with it through an email client or through a ‘news’ client, but the important thing was the discussion.

But all of this got me wondering – where does one find good resources comparing the various CMC/CSCW methods for efficacy? Any starting points truly appreciated. 

(I will get the ‘Comments’ feature working real soon, but if someone does actually read this and want to contribute, they can email me at leslies@island.net)