Tag: collaboration

Current list of U.S. eLearning Patents and Patent Applications

http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/IMM/I070524P.pdf

I believe, though could be mistaken, that this valuable list of current US e-learning patents was created by Jim Farmer at im+m.

This next comment goes in the “Scott complaining about something that is free” bin, but Jim, is there any way you could maintain this (if that is what you are doing in) in something like DabbleDB or a GoogleDoc spreadsheet? Something that automatically produces an RSS feed (and that you could give permission to others to add to, so as to not have to shoulder the burden alone).

Efforts like this that keep the community appraised are immensely valueable. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but much like the case with the Ed Tech conference listings I documented a while back, in this day and age we need to be looking at web-based formats and tools by default, ones that produce RSS and allow collaborative editing. There is simply too much too kepp track of to do otherwise, and it is only in spreading the load that we can hope to keep up. – 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

Draft paper on using community software for rich constructivist education

http://tecfa.unige.ch/proj/seed/catalog/
docs/sevilla03-schneider.pdf

This 39 page paper (draft 1.5) by Daniel Schneider is well worth the effort. On top of the ton of good thinking on why traditional CMS don’t suffice and what roles the instructor might play within different pedagogical designs, the paper was worthwhile simply for introducing (at least to me) the term “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems” (C3MS) to describe packages such as Plone, PostNuke and Drupal. As the author notes, these are often discussed as ‘content management systems’ but this term belies much of their true nature as collaborative and community-building content management systems. – SWL

– via [Kairosnews]

IADIS 2004 Conference – Web Based Communities

http://www.iadis.org/wbc2004/committees.asp

I don’t normally blog conference announcements, but this one seemed pretty interesting. The International Association for Development of the Information Society has put out a call for papers for it’s upcoming conference, to be held March 25-26, 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal, on the theme of ‘web based communities.’ As they say on the conference home page, the goal “is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-based Communities.” Portugal in March, hmmm, I can think of worse places to be. – SWL

Glance Networks – Remote desktop viewing through a web browser

http://www.glance.net/site/home.asp

There are lots of desktop sharing programs out there. I came across this one today in search of a program that would allow me to have many remote users view my desktop(and pretty well do *only* that) and not require them to have anything but a web browser, e.g. no other client software required.

There’s a tiny app to download on my end; the service runs in an ASP-model, so they give you an unique URL on their server, and then sharing you desktop is as easy as starting the program and then passing the URL to anyone you want to see it. Pretty close to real-time viewing of your desktop in your guest’s web browser. Their pricing model is not ‘bad’ ($400/year for unlimited one-to-many sessions, and they have monthly plans as well) but could maybe use some tweaking if it were to appeal to higher ed users as a potential low cost/low threshold application. – SWL  

Trillian Pro – Windows IM client that communicates with AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ clients

Buried within this recent slashdot thread on MS’s move to license access to MSN Messenger users for non-MS Messenger clients came reference to this multi-protocol Windows-based IM client that was new to me (I’m a real IM newbie, if you couldn’t tell).  

Not only does it support messaging to all these various other clients, it apparently has an RSS plug-in too so you can read your feeds in it! This is probably not news to regular IM users, as apparently the free version has something like 11 million downloads to date. But having just installed 3 different IM clients last Friday, I must say I am very attracted by its potential (and thus concerned about what the MS announcement might mean for it, but that’s another story). – SWL

Simply Blown Away by Silicon Chalk Demo

Both Michelle Lamberson from UBC and Bruce Landon had raved about its potential to me before, and I take recommendations from both of them seriously, but in checking out the company website a few months back and downloading a trial version of the software, I must say I was at the time left a bit puzzled about what all the foofraw was about.

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