e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics, Part III

    Well, I should have learned by now not to promise in advance how many parts a series will have and when I will complete them. It seems that, as soon as I declare publicly what my blogging plans are, Brother Fate smacks me upside the head with his big, fat overcommitment stick.

    But apparently I’m a slow learner, because here comes another statement I’m bound to regret. If you work on competencies and rubrics for ANGEL, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, or any other system and are willing to share information, I’d like to talk to you. My goal would be to write not a review but an overview of the basic principles underlying your system design, much as I have done with this series. Many thanks to Kenneth Chapman and the D2L team for being so open. I think this kind of dialog really helps us move the state of the art forward.

    At any rate, this is very late and somewhat abbreviated, but here, at last, is Part III of the series.

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  • Turning Your Blog Into a Social Network Node

    I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you the last installment on the D2L competencies series, but that’s going to take more mental bandwidth than I have at the moment. My goal is to get to it this weekend.

    In the meantime, I note this article on GigaOm about the DiSo Project, which aims to turn WordPress blogs into social network nodes using technologies such as OpenID and microformats. While I don’t think this is necessarily the Nirvana of social networking (if there even is such a thing), I would personally welcome it as a step in the right direction. First, it’s focusing on using open standards and a platform that isn’t owned by one giant vendor. Those are good things. Second, as a blogger, I would prefer to own my primary identity node rather than going out and copying personal information into 50 different social networking sites, none of which I feel any special affinity for. As one blogger quoted in the article puts it,

    For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

    The article does go on to talk about how some people will prefer “ephemeral” identities that they can use for specific purposes and throw them away, rather than the strong anchor that a blog-based node would provide. For me, it’s not an either/or thing. Both would be useful.

  • Sakai Newport 2007: The State of the Union

    Six months ago, following the Amsterdam conference, I was highly encouraged by some of the signs of progress I was seeing in the Sakai community. In an exchange with a commenter on that post, I wrote,

    The question I’m trying to answer in this blog post is, given these sorts of concerns, how much progress are we likely to see in the next 12-24 months? This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. How does one gauge the health and vitality of any community? My experience has been that an open source project can change direction and take off like a rocket, drop off a cliff, or drift aimlessly, and that this change of direction can happen with little advance warning to even careful outside observers. The leading indicators of a change in direction or velocity tend to be relatively intangible, having to do with the alchemy of the particular inter-personal and inter-institutional relationships that drive the project. They are subtle enough that you often won’t pick them up if you don’t hang around and observe over a significant period of time. For example, if I hadn’t been at the Atlanta conference six months ago, my impression of the Amsterdam conference probably would have been different (and closer to yours).

    My observation as somebody who is not quite an outsider but not quite an insider to the community is that there have been subtle but extremely important shifts in the community dynamics. If I am right, then we should start seeing more tangible indicators of this change within the next 6-12 months and real progress within the next 12-24 months.

    So, six months later, did I see “tangible indicators” of change? The answer is unequivocally yes.

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  • Greetings from the Sakai Conference

    The third post in my series on D2L’s competency system is going to have to wait a bit, since I am at the Sakai conference for the week. (I’ll try to finish it up after I return home and have had a chance to recover from my trip.) I’m not one for live-blogging, but I’ll try to get in a couple of posts about my experiences about the conference here and there–starting with this one.

    First of all, let me wish the warmest of congratulations to returning Sakai Foundation Board member Jutta Treviranus and to new board members Lance Speelmon and Josh Barron. While I would have been privileged to serve, I have no doubt that the community has picked three outstanding representatives who will do them proud.

    Today I attended a couple of pre-conference working groups. One of the most exciting conversations of the day was about cross-tool interoperability. What the group actually ended up talking about was an idea very similar to the “LMOS service broker” idea that Patrick Masson, Bernie Durfee and I advocated while we were at SUNY and that I blogged about here (parts I and II). You can read those posts to get a fuller idea of what this is all about but, in brief, the basic concept is that any tool should be able to say to some sort of service registry or bus, “Hey, I have an assignment here; does anybody out there have anything they can do with an assignment?” Other tools might respond by saying, “Yeah, I can grade an assignment,” or “Yeah, I can store an assignment in the person’s ePortfolio”, or any one of a hundred other things. Links to those services are dynamically generated into some sort of in-page component, e.g., a drop-down menu. The user could then apply those services without leaving the page, and this would all be provided essentially without the tool developer having to know in advance what services will be available. (At Oracle, the phrase I keep hearing for these sorts of drop-in services is “contextual actions.”) I’m really high on this potential development for a lot of reasons; maybe when I get home and recharge a little I’ll find time to write a more detailed post.

    The other development that I’m most excited about is the continued progress toward and enthusiasm for implementing JSR-170 (the java content repository standard) throughout Sakai. (I’ve blogged about this idea here and there as well.) There are lots of good reasons why the community is excited about this, one of which is that there’s a whole lot of functionality in the standard that is available in multiple implementations (both open source and proprietary) so that the community would no longer have to write and maintain its own code for a lot of this complex functionality. That leaves more resources to focus on education-specific affordances, which is exactly what a community like Sakai ought to be doing. I, of course, am personally most excited by the possibilities of putting all that learning content into a standards-accessible repository, freed from the shackles of course instances and no longer dragged to the bottom of the sea every time a course is archived.

    There’s a lot more to blog about, but I have no energy for it tonight. More soon.

  • The 2007 Edublog Awards Final Voting is Open

    The nominations are in and voting is now open for the 2007 Edublog Awards (a.k.a. “the Eddies”). I am honored to say that e-Literate is a finalist in the Best Individual Blog category.

    Now comes the best part. You get to go through the list of finalists and discover all the gems that you never knew existed. The conveners (Josie Fraser and James Farmer), have promised that they will be publishing a del.icio.us feed of all the nominees, but in the meantime, the list of finalists should keep you busy with lots of good reading. (Many thanks, Josie and James!)

    Go explore, and don’t forget to vote!

  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics, Part II

    I’ve been a little surprised at the amount of attention–both positive and negative–that my first post in this series has received. I want to address some of the comments on the negative side. There seems to be some concern that systems like D2L’s might promote bureaucratic mandates that increase burdens on teachers, or that they reduce teaching to training. I understand where these concerns are coming from, but I wonder how much of this is really about terminology. There seems to be an allergic reaction to the terms “competency” and “learning objective,” perhaps even to the point where the language is getting in the way of our being able to objectively assess the educational affordances of the software.

    So I’m going to change my plan a bit for this series. In this post, I’d like to try to abstract away from the terminology and lay out a framework that will hopefully let us explore those affordances without the linguistic baggage dragging us down. Fundamentally, I’m going to propose that the most productive way to think about a system such as D2L’s is in terms of metadata. When we use tags (for example), nobody really thinks that the total value of the object being tagged can be reduced to the meaning of the tags themselves. It’s just not even a serious question. So what happens to our understanding of competency modeling in the context of higher education when we think about it as a tagging exercise?

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  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I

    Anyone who has been awake in higher education in the last couple of years knows that there is a lot of attention on outcomes and assessment lately (although with distinctly different emphases in the U.S. and the E.U.). A natural consequence of this attention is that the various LMS platform developers are adding capabilities that are focused in this area. Blackboard has probably created the biggest splash with their highly promoted Outcomes product, but all the major platforms are doing work in this area, to different degrees and employing different strategies. I’ve been curious for some time about how the different approaches to this thorny problem space will shape up, which is why I am grateful that Ken Chapman, Desire2Learn’s Leade Product Manager, was willing to sit down with me at EDUCAUSE and talk to me about what D2L is doing in this area.

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