Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content
&id=12840&repository=0001_article
Via Ray Schroeder comes this article from Stanford outlining the possible future of the CourseWork project and stating a possible $730K a year price tag to keep it going. This seems unlikely, but probably shouldn’t be discounted out of hand. – SWL
http://ets.berkeley.edu/etstandards/sakai/
Similar to the last webcast they provided back in December concerning Lionshare, the University of California system (and specifically UC Berkeley, who seem to be hosting the event) are providing a webcast stream of a presentation by Joseph Hardin, the Director of the Collaborative Technologies Lab Media Union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor concerning the SAKAI project. I only caught the morning of the Lionshare talk, so don’t know if the question and answer sessions in the afternoon are typically broadcast. But hopefully they will be for this one, as the ‘Questions on Chef and Sakai’ put together by the UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services – Learning Systems Group are of great interest and extremely pertinent to anyone embarking on the development or deployment of an open source CMS or other elearning component in an post-secondary enterprise environment. The talk is on Monday, January 12th, 2004 from 9 am – 12 noon PST, so I guess there is some small solace in not being able to get to the CANARIE sponsored sessions in Vancouver that day. – SWL
http://www.ipohome.com/ipoplus/press/
usatoday_120403.asp
The same day that the article appeared in the Washington Post speculating on the possibility of Blackboard going public because of repeated meetings with investment bankers, the above article was published, concerning the potential re-kindling of tech IPOs. But as if to dampen down the growing rumours, Michael Chasen, Blackboard’s CEO, is featured in the article downplaying his company’s need to go public (which seems quite likely true, what with their recent earnings reports and an overall climate that meant Blackboard has not had “to worry about other overfunded companies in our space.”) The speculation continues… – SWL
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/tlig/vle/vle2003.pdf
This report by Tom Browne and Martin Jenkins is a follow up to one done in 2001. While the survey is very much couched in the language and context of U.K. higher education, results concerning typical support models, decision-making models, and build-buy decisions are likely of general interest. One point to note: over the course of the 2 year period covered by these reports, Blackboard lept ahead of WebCT in adoption in the U.K., and the two large commercial vendors continue to dominate the landscape. But the report did find an interesting contrasting development – an increase in the number of ‘intranet-based’ and in-house systems, as well as an increase in the number of institutions supprting 2 different VLEs. – SWL
http://www.publictechnology.net/modules.php?the announcement
op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=316
As if to confirm some points from Martha Whitehead’s paper below, that there is a growing availability of means to integrate library systems with CMS, this press release announces news of integration plans for this U.K.-based “learning resource management system” with both WebCT and Blackboard (though this press release points only to the WebCT announcement).
Even more interesting perhaps is that Sentient’s Discover product is also starting to bridge the world of library collections and learning object repositories; its 2.0 version, to be released in January, will allow users to retrieve results from both their institutional library catalogue and the MERLOT metadata repository in the same search. – SWL
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/martha/
archives/000580.html
From Michelle comes reference to both this useful paper and a new blog by her colleague, Martha Whitehead, the Head of Information Services at the University of British Columbia Library. The paper is a brief summary of some of the issues and progress made to date to bring library systems, and the services librarians have to offer, into the insitutional elearning/CMS mix. Contains a useful bibliography of citations on this issue. – SWL
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000593.html
ATTENTION WEBCT ADMINISTRATORS!
I’ve been waiting a few weeks to tell people about this one since I saw it demo’d at the BC Ed Tech Users Group meetings, but promised Michelle that I wouldn’t post on it before her (since she’s the one that works at UBC, and not me.)
The folks at UBC (the original home of WebCT) have developed a set of scripts that mine the usage data and a few other variables in the WebCT database and give a system-wide picture of how the system is being used, and more importantly, allows you to anticipate the kind of usage coming down the pipe by looking at the scheduled tests and quizzes across the board. This is invaluable – for the first time within this system one can get a heads-up if 5,000 users are about to crash your server at the same time to take their Chem 101 test, while another 3,000 happen to be scheduled to take a Biology exam the same morning. And as you’d expect from a place that’s obviously in the know, there’s an RSS feed for this data!
Don’t be put off by the Flintbox site Michelle points to – the scripts are being offered for free, even though there appears to be a small registration process (and ominous talk of ‘patents’ and ‘licensing’) to wade through before you can grab it. – SWL
Last week Alan was lamenting the seeming dissappearance of a number of formerly prolific edubloggers. I too had wondered where many people had disappeared to, though I seem to recall from my days ‘inside’ the institution that November and December can be particularly hectic times.
In the spirit of widening the circle, here’s a few other educational bloggers I have stumbled on to recently, and that I haven’t seen mentioned widely yet:
In particular I would highlight the first two, Brian Alger’s and Gord McKenzie’s, as so far containing lots of thought provoking material.
And as has been pointed out a number of times, one of the beauties of RSS is the ability to be notified of activity on a blog that has otherwise been inactive simply by keeping a subscription to their feed in your aggregator. The way I manage that in bloglines is to create a folder titled ‘Dormant’ so that I can keep track of blogs that do not seem to be posting regularly anymore. – SWL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A33240-2003Dec3.html
Via Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update comes a link to this article speculating on the possibility that Blackboard will go public sometime in the near future. I remember being disappointed before the bubble burst that they hadn’t IPO’d, as they seemed a good candidate at the time. In retrospect they are looking like geniuses now – missed having their market capitalization decimated and grew the company to where it has real profits. – SWL
http://www.nettskolen.com/in_english/webedusite/
Spend enough time studying one specific field online and you begin to feel you have a sense of what’s going on in that field, right? Maybe, but it was a pleasant shock for me to stumble across this site (via some links on the below mentioned author, Morten Paulsen’s, homepage.)
The NKI Group from the NKI Internet College has been working on the WEB-EDU project which “aims to study internet based learning management systems to provide comprehensive recommendations and reference material for European education and training organizations.”
For me this is a minor gold mine of material – there’s lots to digest in the Analyses section, and their list of CMS used by their study participants contains many CMS that are relatively unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. Hurray for Serendipity! – SWL