e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Bring On Da Noise: The Backchannel Panel

    I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Barry Dahl has a great post analyzing the back-channel comments from our recent panel discussion with Stephen Downes and Robbie Melton. He concludes that only 31% of the posts were productive, by which he means on-topic questions or comments. This issue came up during the panel discussion itself, and Robbie (brilliantly, in my opinion) characterized it as a “teachable moment.”

    I think a big reason why there was so much off-topic chatter is that we didn’t really establish clear patterns or norms for how the back-channel would be encorporated into the larger dialog. The audience treated it like an experiment because we treated it like an experiment. I heard some suggestions from audience members afterward about how the technology could be modified to improve the experience (e.g., disallow anonymous posting, shut off the flow when the panelists are talking, have a moderator filter the comments, etc.), but before I would want to try imposing any of those hard limits on the participants, I would first want to try having a little more preparatory dialog with them about the most productive ways to use the backchannel and how we all would like to interact with it.

  • Looking for Suggestions on Mapping Software

    OK, Dear Reader, I need your help once again. You haven’t let me down yet.

    My wife is working on a summer program for high school ESL kids who come from all over the world. She and her colleagues are fairly non-technical. They want to create a map of the world where they can display information about all the students in the program and where they come from. Here are the features I’m looking for:

    • Should be able to show an entire world map, since these kids come from all over
    • Should be easy for a non-technical person to find the right place on the map (maybe by entering the name of city and country), add a pushpin there, and annotate the pushpin with text, links, and pictures
    • Should be easy to embed in a web page
    • Should look cool (e.g., zooming in on a locale and picture) on a touch-sensitive smart board

    My guess is that these criteria should be easy to meet with multiple solutions. I looked at Google mapplets, but they don’t appear to be embeddable. I’m doing my homework, but if anybody knows can save me time by posting something, I’d be grateful. We’re on a bit of a deadline. Bonus points for any tutorials or real-world teaching examples you can point me to that also hit all of these criteria.

    Thanks, folks.

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Michael Staton

    Michael is the CEO of a company called Inigral, the company that produces the Facebook Courses application. You may have seen his earlier guest post for the On the Horizon. I have been talking a fair bit with Michael lately because my team at Oracle has been working with his company on integration through the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (Again, more on this real soon when we release our product.) We’re entering a new era with Web 2.0 where the university (with the students’ permission) may want to share data with outside applications for specific educational purposes. These new software configurations lead to new kinds of business partnerships, where the university’s relationship with the vendor is quite different than the traditional model. This is all in addition to the basic question of how these Web 2.0 capabilities should fit with and influence the unversity’s approaches to teaching and learning with technology.

    Michael is grappling with all of these issues right now, so I’ve invited him to come and think out loud with us here about them here on e-Literate.

  • Desire2Learn Conference Summary

    I had fun at the D2L conference last week. As usual, I don’t have as much time as I would like to blog about the details, so this highlight post will have to do:

    • Conference attendance was good. There were about 550 attendees this year, up from about 400 last year.
    • I had chance to get a brief tour of D2L’s new ePortfolio product. It’s quite good, although I continue to be struck by how much effort all the LMS vendors have to put into writing content management capabilities that have been implemented 6,947 times in other systems already. In an ideal world, they would be able to call existing code and focus their efforts on building education-specific enhancements.
    • After my rant about conference bags, D2L made a point of giving out bags that can be re-used as cloth grocery sacks. Now that’s a company with values! I have already re-used my bag for this purpose and am happy to report that it works great.
    • D2L is also the only company I’m aware of that produced a theme album for their conference. Since it was in Memphis, they licensed well-known music that was appropriate for the venue and put it on a CD with the conference program.
    • The attendees seemed to be both well informed and realistic about the patent fight. Despite the risks, new customers are still signing on with D2L. (I even saw an old SUNY colleague from Suffolk County Community College, which just left Blackboard for D2L.)
    • I had a highly enjoyable if somewhat chaotic panel discussion with Barry Dahl, Stephen Downes, and Robbie Melton. It was I have taken to calling The Stephen Downes Experience, with the chat backchannel projected for the audience and speakers to see. I admit that I struggled to keep up with the conversation flow, especially when I was speaking, but the struggle was definitely worth it. I will say, though, that it’s important to set expecations with the audience. Some attendees told me they were not expecting a Web 2.0 social experiment and were a little disappointed that they didn’t get a more traditional panel discussion.
    • I missed the D2L Version 8.3 product launch, but I’m told that their integration story is a big part of it and that they highlighted work that they’ve been doing with my team at Oracle on implementing IMS Enterprise Services v2 (now called Learning Information Services). I’ll have much more to say about that Real Soon Now, when we release our own product.
    • Good news: I managed to avoid spilling beer on Barry Dahl this time. Bad news: That’s partly because I didn’t drink any beer this time.

  • Victory for D2L, Opportunity for Blackboard

    Well, my flight was delayed, so I missed the opportunity to witness D2L’s court victory celebration at Graceland. And I’m sure that they celebrated tonight The court denied Blackboard’s motion for contempt, meaning that Desire2Learn version 8.3 was found to be “more than colorably different” than the infringing version of the software and the court will not find that D2L’s software infringes under the framework of this trial. This does not necessarily mean D2L 8.3 is now and forever free from Blackboard’s patent. What it does mean is that, in order to pursue D2L 8.3, Blackboard would have to start a whole new trial–basically the same long, drawn out and expensive process that they just went through.

    This is another big opportunity for Blackboard to choose discretion as the better part of valor and quit the field. Blackboard still has a small but quickly diminishing chance to salvage their brand, but in order to do so they need to stop this patent foolishness now.

  • The 'On the Horizon' Series Is Complete

    With Jim Farmer’s post, we have completed the series. I want to thank both the authors and the readers who have commented on this post. I’m hopeful that this process has shaped the final product, which will be a journal issue published some time early next year. We hope to have the contents of that issue published through some open access venue and will keep you posted on the details as they shape up.

  • Going to the D2L Conference

    Correction: My presentation with Bill Lee is on Wednesday, not Thursday.

    I’ll be going to the Desire2Learn conference Monday night through Wednesday morning this coming week. I’ll be on a lunch panel on Tuesday (I finally will meet Stephen Downes F2F) and will be doing a presentation on IMS Learning Information Services and Oracle/D2L integration with D2L’s Bill Lee on Thursday AM. If you’re going to the conference, feel free to ping me or to track me down.