e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Jim Farmer

  • CIOs, Community Source, and the New Management

    Here’s another post from frequent guest poster Jim Farmer. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting news of the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn trial, Jim will be in East Texas next week and has promised at least one blog post regarding the trial.

    Several weeks ago Luke Fernandez, Weber State University, asked should knowledge of “community source” be a criterion for selecting a CIO. Posting on the Sakai Advocacy list, he wrote:

    My guess is that including criteria which prompt a committee to consider whether the candidate has experience leveraging the power of community source (or, more broadly speaking, “knows how to globalize”–to borrow from Thomas Friedman) might eclipse a broader more representative set of criteria that need to be articulated when considering a CIO. But I’m not sure about this–I’ll know better once we’ve met.

    If anybody has conducted hiring (especially at the executive level) that includes some consideration of open source in the hiring criteria I’d be interested in how that criteria was articulated/included.

    My suggestion, off list, is provided here in an edited version.

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  • Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc.

    UPDATE: With his permission, we have appended an email response by LSU CIO Brian D. Voss in the comments section of this post.

    On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

    Because their process was public, we have access to valuable details that are not often available for institutional decisions such as this one.

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  • Common Cartridge: e-Learning Made Easy

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On September 4, 2007, a summer morning in Adelphi, Maryland, the workgroup, breakfast in hand, slowly assembled into in a large conference room at the University of Maryland, University College (UMUC). The tables were assembled in a U-shape with twelve places on each of the three sides. A digital projector on a stand in the center became the symbolic altar of digital technology. A large screen at the open side of the U illuminated knowledge with multicolored four-line outlines, charts, graphs, “screen captures” and illustrations.

    Heads down behind black or sliver laptop screens, eleven representatives of publishers, software suppliers, higher education organizations, and colleges and universities sat scattered among the conference tables. As part of the IMS Global Learning Consortium Common Cartridge Test Fest, they had been considering how this technology could be used to transfer digital content from publishers and authors to learning management systems for use by faculty and students.

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  • Should Universities Patent Their Research? Universities Say Yes. But should they?

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    At the December 2006 Sakai Conference in Atlanta many expressed the view that patents inhibit collaboration and innovation in teaching and learning. But that was not the view expressed by higher education representatives in last month’s Congressional hearing.

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  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable: Part II

    This is a guest post blog by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” The Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.”

    The report relied heavily on two commissioned papers. Dr. James V. Koch authored “An Economic Analysis of Textbook Pricing and Textbooks Markets” distributed in September 2006. He made some suggestions how the “markets” for textbooks could be improved to provide lower prices. (He did not use the term “textbooks and other learning materials” later used in the Advisory Committee’s report).

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  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” the Advisory Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.,”

    The report was the well-referenced, thoughtful and realistic document and recommendations for which the Committee is known. Higher education should view the report as a warning of the “groundswell of criticism against colleges, bookstores, and publishers” Congress is receiving from constituents already concerned by high and increasing costs of college. Faculty should now be aware cost and effectiveness of learning materials and instructional methods will become an issue. Publishers should accelerate their effort for interoperability and cost reduction.

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