Category: Uncategorized

CETIS Article on Automatic Metadata Generator

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050127043826

This article by Wilbert Kraan of CETIS will undoubtably make the rounds in the next few days, but it seemed too signifcant to not post on myself.

Many of us have heard speechs and read articles by one of the IEEE LOM’s creators, Erik Duval, to the effect that metadata needs to become more invisible to end users, in part through automating its creation. Well Erik and the crew at KU Leuven haven’t just talked about it – as Wilbert describes, they have released an open source ‘framework’ for the automated generation of metadata based on the context of its use. Extremely exciting news. – SWL

California State University Signs System Wide Deal with Blackboard Inc.

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]

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

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 

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

The Changing Landscape and the New Academy

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0353.pdf

This article from the latest educause journal describes nine patterns in the changing educational landscape, the first of which is “Learning and teaching have changed, as has cognition” (emphasis mine.)  It goes on in greater detail to explain that:

 A growing number of today’s students, whose cognition was formed in the digital age, take access to the Internet for granted; access is simply an essential aspect of daily life. These students display an “Information-Age Mindset”: they expect to try things rather than hear about things; and they tend to learn visually and socially. Today’s students are accustomed to using technology to organize and integrate knowledge. These students are polite, but also bewildered at first, later disappointed, and often finally disillusioned and dispirited by passive learning experiences.

Is it in fact ‘cognition,’ the act through which we ‘come to know,’ that is changing? Well … maybe. But I couldn’t just let this statement slip by, as it is uttered with apparent certainty and yet the amount of contention surrounding this one issue can, and indeed has, filled up more than a few books. – SWL

– via [OLDaily]