Tag: CMS

CMS and ePortfolio: At the Crossroads

http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?
id=10041&typeid=155

Well worth the read, this measured and non-reactionary piece by Stephen Acker contemplates the need for institutions to engage and integrate eportfolio systems with their existing course management systems in order to facilitate both sides of the teaching and learning equation. As much as I am at times attracted to ‘loosely-coupled small tools’ visions of some of my fellow edtech bloggers, this strikes me as closer to what will actually emerge in most institutions over the next few years. – SWL

What are the ‘Deficiencies’ of Current CMS?

On a pretty regular basis I hear griping from people in the edtech blogging community about how terrible CMS platform X is, or how they are being forced to settle on the functionality provided in CMS platform Y. Rarely, however, do people get specific about what they can’t accomplish in the existing CMS (I’m referring to the existing market leaders – you know who I mean.) So here’s your chance – use the comments below to tell me, and others, what you think is wrong with the ‘majors’ right now, & more importantly what you need to accomplish but can’t in your existing CMS environment. I’ll start things off:
Continue reading “What are the ‘Deficiencies’ of Current CMS?”

Alt-i-Lab papers and highlights

http://members.imsglobal.org/forum/ims/
dispatch.cgi/f.altilabtech

Lucky for us all, the IMS have posted the supporting papers and slides in a publicly accessible area. Day Two of the sessions I was assigned to the Content working group. The promise of this group had been to tackle some of the questions laid out in the stimulating “Repository Management and Implementation” overview paper. But somewhat disappointedly to me, day one seemed given over mostly to talk of existing or emerging digital library standards, and while these are likely of interest and pertinent to others I found it hard to stay engaged.

Which led me on day two to migrate over to the somewhat oddly named “Tools” group, which ended up being a far more fascinating discussion on the world and problems of ‘learning design.’ Day Two in this group ended up being more of what I think of as a ‘working group’; real experts (James Dalziel, David Wiley, Bill Olivier and Gilbert Paquette, amongst others) hashing out real problems with the specification and what problems it is supposed to solve. It was both an honour and a learning experience to be able to sit in.

There really are a lot of worthwhile papers in this directory and they represent some of the state of the art thinking in the field, so take time going through them. Some of the powerpoint slides are also thorough enough to stand apart from their accompanying speeches; Brad Wheeler’s talk on how Open Source supports Open Specifications, Chris Etesse from Blackboard’s Ed Tech framework, and Fabrizio Cardinali from Giunti’s romp through the future of personalized learning all seem worthy of mention.

While there were lots of stimulating papers and talks, ultimately my first Alt-I-Lab will end up being remembered more because of the relationships begun and re-kindled. In addition to meeting fellow bloggers David Wiley and Raymond Yee for the first time, I spent a delightful evening with David Davies and Mark Stiles over a tasty Middle Eastern meal (go figure, easily the most popular restaurant in the small town of Redwood City.) All in all, well worth it, and hopefully I’ll find a way to next year’s event. – SWL

Enterprise-wide deployment of Moodle at Dublin City University

Moodle http://odtl.dcu.ie/wp/2004/odtl-2004-01.html

Nice paper documenting the rationale and steps to shift from a current enterprise-wide WebCT install to one using Moodle. They looked at three open source alternatives (Boddington, Claroline and Moodle). It is interesting to note what they stated as Moodle’s main current weakness, “the fact that, although there were already many small scale deployments in operation, at that time it had not yet been adopted on an enterprise basis by any university-level institution.” It will be interesting to see how Sakai stacks up in this regard, as the (perceived or real) lack of ‘enterprise-readiness’ continues to be one of the main sticking points for larger institutions who may be interested in open source CMS but worried about their ability to scale and integrate. – SWL

Sakai Release Candidate 1 released today (anyone got a demo running yet?)

http://www.sakaiproject.org/press/sakai-rc1.html

You’ve probably seen this news announced already in a number of places; as promised Sakai Release Candidate 1 was released today. This post is more a query if anyone has got a build up and running that I can have a look at. Pressed for time right now myself, but maybe I’ll get one going in the next few weeks if no one else steps forward. It looks slightly involved, though not too bad. – SWL

ACollab – accessible, open source, multi-group, Web-based collaborative work environment

http://www.atutor.ca/acollab/index.php

If you weren’t already impressed enough with Atutor, the accessible, open source LMS from U of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, along comes the second piece in their ever-growing suite of accessible learning technologies. With shared document authoring, calendering, chat, threaded discussion and extensive group support, ACollab is WCAG 1.0, Section 508 US-compliant software that can be easily integrated with Atutor to provide a powerful open source learning environment. Caution: use of this product may actually enable learning amongst an entire class of people who are otherwise discriminated against by badly designed, inaccessible technologies. – SWL

A Case Study on Different pedagogical uses of CMS with different learner groups

http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=6728&
page=65&catID=226&printable=1

It’s been far to easy in the past for various people to claim ‘such and such commerical CMS simply won’t do because it doesn’t deal with my pedagogical model.’ And sometimes it’s true – the kind of interaction you want to promote may not be doable within a specific environment because its user model and application logic simply were never built to accomodate it. But it’s also served as an all to easy excuse to trash some of the commercial CMS, when the real issue lay as often in the fact that they were commercial systems, and that someone had ‘imposed’ the choice of that system on the faculty member.

This short case study from Kingston College in the U.K. stands in contrast to that rather polarized debate as a model of sanity. After two years of using Blackboard, they came to realize that it seemed to be more effective in certain kinds of courses, and that for it to be more effective in all the kinds of courses they taught they needed to look at how the system was being used, and link that to the kinds of learning and interactions that were needed. As they say, “approaches in the classroom for these three different levels of course will differ. We now recognise that the way in which e-learning is utilised must also differ. Emerging from the review process has been a simple model, which maps out the key functions in Blackboard, that appear to be most productive for each form of pedagogy.”

After re-reading it, I think I am giving the article too much credit – while they took the step of recognizing that certain tools never came into play in certain types of learning (and thus could turn them off and not have students searching for material where none was), they don’t appear to be advocating the further step of recognizing that the specific tools can be used differently in different contexts, and that while the design of a tool may prescribe its uses in some ways, it does not dictate them. – SWL

http://www.educause.edu/pub/
eq/eqm04/eqm0421.asp

Given that the idea of perpetual email accounts is enough to make most IT administrators packup and run, the innovations in offering lifelong learning environments presented in this Educause Quarterly article by Ellen R. Cohn are likely to fall on similarly unreceptive ears in many IT departments. Still, the ideas are worth considering. But are they worth considering because the technology seems to enable this, or would the value proposition behind them still be there without the technology? Via Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update. – SWL

Harmoni PHP Project

http://sourceforge.net/projects/harmoni

Also from the NITLE site, a reference to this OKI-related open source project, which consists of three major components:
1) A PHP application framework and architecture, offering, e.g. authentication, DBC, file storage
2) PHP OKI OSID (service definitions) conversion system
3) PHP implementations of those OSIDs

This is the result of a collaboration of two projects we’ve heard a little bit about in the past, Segue (which has been referred to at times as the ‘blogging-based CMS’) and a LMS from the Associated Colleges of the South Tech Centre. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this project to OKI – originally all of the OKI castings were in Java which, for all of the sense it may have made, to me was also a serious impediment to many non-institutional developers (read ‘individual instructors’) being able to build in it/on it. Having the OKI OSIDs implemented in PHP suddenly opens the door to the potentially much vaster legion of people who are developing systems and individual learning apps in that language. – SWL