I was actually pretty pleased about the fact that when a colleague mentioned this group to me, I had never heard of them before. It meant to me that I have created sufficient distance with any ‘administrative computing’ past. The PESC seems to be the domain of registrars and student service (eg. financial aid) folks, but I thought I’d post it because you never know when one of your projects might need to be aware of this alternate universe. Mostly they seem focused on issues like how to ship student transcripts around, though an upcoming conference on the “State of e-Authentication in Higher Education” seemed slightly relevant. – SWL
Category: The Rest
Eduserv Athens authentication system
Arguably more of an administrative than academic computing issue, this was still of interest to me, and I think to elearning systems developers, as I’d argue single-sign-on is one aspect of giving users a better alround experience (presumably leaving their mind more free to actually learn).
This is a U.k.-based Access Management system that provides “secure single username access to multiple web-based access controlled services” with “devolved administration facilities at the organisation level.” Most of us can only look on in envy at the situation (politically at least) in U.K. higher education. In Canada, education is the jurisdiction of the provinces, but even within provinces institutions typically function somewhat autonomously. And The U.S., well fugedabowdit! Private, public, 2 year, 4 year; no wonder such schemes as this just aren’t even considered, and instead something like Shibboleth needs to happen.
Still, there’s likely some things to learn from here, and it seems difficult not to admire their list of protected resources. I expect there’s a British reader out there who might be able to shed more light on this, but single sign-on has been of growing interest to me in the project I am working on, so I thought I’d post on it, regardless of my lack of familiarity with it. – SWL
Training and Resources for Assembling Interactive Learning Systems
http://www.trails-project.org/
This NSF-funded project in the States just makes so much sense – have the univeristy students currently studying to be educational designers and developers work on actual learning content for the K-12 system. As the site says, “Through these courses TRAILS intends to have three major effects: to better prepare tomorrow’s designers of educational tools, to better prepare the teachers who will use such tools, andby publishing select course projects to generate new tools for K-12 education.” Obvious? Maybe. Innovative. Seems to me, definitely! – SWL
Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary Differences and the Issue of Progression
http://www.shef.ac.uk/nlc2004/Proceedings/Symposia/
Symposium9/Jones_et_al.htm
Paper by Chris Jones, Maria Zenios and Jill Griffiths which looks at the differences between disciplines in their uptake of digital technologies in a UK post-secondary setting. The paper is part of the proceeedings of the recent Networked Learning Conference 2004 held at Lancaster University.
This is important for those of us involved in institution-wide (or multi-institution-wide, as it were) initiatives to remember. In my own practice, it was actually looking at DSpace and a number of the other repository-like packages that work on the metaphor of discipline-specific ‘collections’ that made me include the ability of the repository software to also serve individual disciplines as one requirement in our ongoing BCcampus LOR project. – SWL
iCommons Canada Project
http://www.cippic.ca/icommons-canada
Via Mike Mattson at the U of C (thanks Mike!) comes mention of this initiative to “develop Creative Commons licences for Canadian artists” (and presumably other content creators as well). They promise that the final draft of the Canadian Creative Commons licenses will be available by September 30th. I’m interested to find out how this would diverge from the existing CC licenses (as I am a Canadian already publishing material under that license.) – SWL
Personal Bugaboo – no pointers to online map services
This is not an edtech related post but I felt the need to rant and well, it’s my blog so I’ll rant if I want to…
It is beyond me how there still exist any institutional websites that offer ‘Contact Pages’ with their address but that don’t also use one the myriad online maps services that exist to point to an online map of their location. You know, handy sites like Yahoo Maps or Mapquest. Maybe these are the same people who think the Internet is simply a ‘fad,’ just like ‘horse-less carriages.’
Unless my relationship with the person is restricted solely to face to face or the phone (which is increasingly rare for me) I basically refuse to write out in long directions to anywhere anymore – instead, I simply point folks to a URL and let them build their own map. For instance, if you ever want to come visit my office, you can find me here. Lucky for me, there is a campus next door to the one I have to visit tomorrow (that visit having prompted the above rant) that gets it. – SWL
Introduction to Latent Semantic Indexing
http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm
This paper, titled “Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization” is offered by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education as a “layman’s introduction to latent semantic indexing.” It does start to go into the specifics of how LSI works, but fortunately at an introductory enough level that most of us can grasp. This paper has it all: metadata…ontologies…visualization … what more could you ask for! A helpful introduction to an overlooked technology. See also the NITLE’s LSI project page for pointers to PERL-based LSI software. (Thanks to Bruce Landon for the tip.)- SWL
University of Denver Portfolio Community
https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/about
While I expect it is not news to folks thoroughly immersed in ‘eportfolio’ projects, I found this site from the University of Denver to be very helpful in illustrating some of what one can accomplish through these systems. As a member of the public one can get a free account which opens up some searches not otherwise available (like the Rubric and Element libraries) but, as one would expect, the portfolios of students and staff are browse-able by anyone. – SWL
Goodbye C2T2
Not exactly news as around these parts we had known for a while it was going to happen, but it was with a heavy heart that I came upon this updated homepage for the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology, or C2T2, my former employer. The Centre officially closed March 31, but as you can see many of its useful resources and services are being transitioned to other partners in the BC post-secondary system, and a good portion of the work C2T2 had started of late is now going ahead under the new banner of BCcampus.
So hopefully this marks just a transition to a new phase in BC rather than the end of an era – I know while I was at the Centre, as I travelled to various events in Canada I was met with something approaching envy by other provinces who longed for the kind of cooperation we seemed to be able to get happening in BC. No doubt it was the cooperative nature of West Coast folks in general that led to this, but I’d like to think that C2T2, and some key people in particular that I was fortunate to work with and learn from, had a little something to do with it as well. – SWL
Fundamental issues with open source software development
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/levesque/
The latest issue of First Monday contains this paper by Michelle Levesque which offers a non-‘fear uncertainty and doubt’-based accounting of some of the common problems with open source projects. Many of these are now commonplace complaints. Based on my own investigations of existing open source learning object repositories and course management systems, I have to concur that many of the problems she outlines, especially the varied quality of documentation and the limited user interfaces, are endemic and do limit the uptake of these systems when they are compared against their commerical alternatives. And as Levesque says, it’s not that any of these failings couldn’t be corrected, and you can point to some open source projects that get it right. – SWL