e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Involving the Teachers

    One of my biggest concerns about the Sakai community from Day 1 has been the need to involve more teachers more directly in the design of the platform. I think that when people hear that they sometimes think of those painfully ineffective design-by-committee initiatives that universities always try and that never work. That’s not really what I had in mind. At the Amsterdam conference, I heard Michael Korcuska express my concern in a way that’s much more clear and effective than anything I’ve formulated on the topic.

    He said the Sakai community needs a Product Manager role. And that’s exactly right. We need product managers, many of whom should be teachers.
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  • Usability Absolutely Does Matter for Adoption

    Chris Coppola has a good post up regarding Sakai adoption. Chris, in turn, is responding to a comment from Trace Urdan in Education Signals:

    Sakai adoption is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues, but by obstacles to the risk/rewards of an open source solution to begin with. Wider Sakai adoption, we think, is more likely to come about by increased activity among its commercial supporters than by tweaks to the platform itself.

    It is absolutely true that adoption of open source user-facing apps in higher education is particularly limited right now by the perception that there is not adequate commercial support (which is why I was particularly pleased to see Sakai’s Executive Director Michael Korcuska acknowledge the importance of the Sakai Commercial Affiliates in a recent blog post).

    However, it is absolutely false that Sakai adoption “is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues.” I have spoken to people at more than one institution in recent weeks where decision-makers either chose not to implement Sakai or chose not to broaden their implementation of Sakai because of usability concerns. By the same token, I have spoken to folks recently whose universities have rejected other LMS platforms where user experience was a big reason for the decision. (Sakai is certainly not the only LMS with usability challenges. Not by a long shot.) The issue of whether you can actually…well…teach and learn with a platform is (thankfully) becoming a real and significant criterion in university adoption processes.

    The Sakai community is doing the right thing by prioritizing user experience improvements. I have no doubt that success will impact adoption.

  • Oracle Doing the Web 2.0 Thing

    I generally don’t blog about my employer too much, since this is a personal blog. But Oracle is doing some interesting (and perhaps surprising) Web 2.0ish things that I thought were worth noting. First, the company now has an official wiki, based on WetPaint, which is open to customers and employees alike for building up an Oracle-related knowledge base. Second, there’s a new external-facing Oracle social network called Mix. The two most compelling features, I think, are the ability to suggest and promote product-related ideas and to ask and answer questions. (By the way, for the geeks in the crowd, Mix is written in JRuby and run on the Oracle technology stack.)

    I have no idea how any of this will develop or how my own group (the Academic Enterprise Solutions group) will end up participating in these initiatives. But it’s an interesting experiment for such a large company, and it bears watching.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Vision for the Technology

    I am honored to announce that I have been nominated to the Sakai Foundation Board by current Board member Ian Dolphin on behalf of the University of Hull. Over the next few weeks between now and the election, I’m going to outline my platform in series of blog posts, starting with this one about the future direction for the Sakai platform that I would like to help bring about.

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  • Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean?

    After Blackboard’s recent earnings announcement and conference call, Jim Farmer and I had a chat about what we learned. One thing that struck us both was that Blackboard’s total number of LMS license customers is declining. Jim, being handy with Excel, put this chart together:

    Blackboard's Total LMS Licenses

    There is a clear long-term trend toward reduced number of total LMS licenses. Furthermore, Blackboard reported a slight decline (by three licenses, compared with a gain of 45 licenses in the same quarter of the previous year) of Enterprise licenses from last quarter to this quarter. At the same time, they are still hitting their revenue and profit numbers, and they have not guided analyst expectations lower. So what’s really going on here?

    As is often the case when analyzing the data from publicly traded companies, the answers aren’t entirely clear. I have some thoughts, though, which I’m happy to share. Before I do, I want to thank Blackboard Vice President, Investor Relations & Global Treasury Michael Stanton, who was as helpful and forthcoming as he is legally allowed to be under SEC regulations in answering follow-up questions that I sent to him on the topic.

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  • My Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards

    Since I have urged all of you to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2007 Edublog Awards (or “Eddies”), I figured I should put my (virtual) money where my (virtual) mouth is and put some of my own nominees on the table. So here are mine:

    Best Individual Blog: Cole Camplese and Seb Schmoller. The reason for both is the same; I find that I actually read and learn from a very high percentage of posts on both blogs. If I only have time to look at a couple of edublogs on a busy day, these are the two that I’ll check for new posts first.

    Best Group Blog: Terra Incognita.  Ken Udas has done a fantastic job of assembling a large and impressive group of guest bloggers on the topics of open source and open educational resources.

    Best New Blog: Terra Incognita again and Mara Hancock’s Promptu. In addition to the fact that she writes about a very important topic (user experience for educational software), I just enjoy Mara’s writing style.

    Best Blogged Research Paper or Project: The eLearning Maturity Model (eMM) on Stephen Marshall’s blog. eMM is one of the most interesting and, frankly, useful ongoing research projects into educational technology adoption and Stephen’s blog covers it admirably well. Also, like many of the others on this list, Stephen is an excellent writer (which is one of the reasons that I had him as a guest blogger on e-Literate).

    Best Educational Tech Support Blog: As Much By Writing. This isn’t the place where you necessarily will go to get your ed tech support, but it is a model for how university IT departments should be augmenting their ed tech support to their campuses via a blog.

    Best eLearning/Corporate Blog: e-Clippings. I feel a little funny nominating in this category since I’ve been out of the corporate side of things long enough that I don’t have a clear sense of what is most useful in that field anymore. But Mark Oehlert’s blog is one of the few on the corporate side that I still read and enjoy on a regular basis. It’s just plain interesting.

    Best Educational use of Video/Visuals: MyGermanClass.com. Hilarious vodcasts of high school German lessons. I don’t speak a word of German and yet I find them strangely compelling.

    OK, that’s it for me–for now, at least. Now it’s your turn.

  • Nominations Are Open for the Edublog Awards

    Every year I am impressed with the effort and quality of results from the Edublog Awards crew. Every year I learn about at least a few edublogs that teach me something important. With nominations now open for the 2007 awards, I urge you to participate. Start by nominating those edublogs that you learn from. Try to include any worthy but relatively unknown edublogs; even if they don’t get the award, at least they’ll get more attention as nominees. I’m talking about making a small community-building effort that pays substantial dividends.

    Please go nominate.