e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Edublog Award Nominations Open

    Wow. I am so behind on posting I can’t believe it. I haven’t even covered all the important stuff from EDUCAUSE yet, and more thought-provoking info keeps washing over the transom every day. I’m going to put in another (possibly futile) effort to catch up over the next few days, starting with a couple of shortish posts today. In the meantime, I hope you have been reading guest blogger Stephen Marshall’s excellent posts.

    To kick this effort off, I’d like to note that nominations for the Edublog awards are open. For those who are new to it, the Edublog awards have been an outstanding forum for recognizing great educational blogs. Every year I have picked up a couple of gems I would not have otherwise known about because they were nominated for the awards.

    The nomination process is by email, and only current bloggers are allowed to nominate. (See? One more reason to start blogging if you haven’t already done so.) Once the nominations are in, everyone can vote. If you are a current blogger, I recommend getting your nominations in ASAP. And regardless of whether you are a current blogger, you should subscribe to the awards blog feed.

  • Guest Blogger: Stephen Marshall

    I am pleased to announce a new experiment at e-Literate. Since I am falling ever further behind in blogging about the all the interesting stuff I come across, I have decided to invite other people who are smarter and more interesting than me to guest blog here periodically.

    My first guest blogger will be Stephen J. Marshall, the Acting Director of the University Teaching Development Centre at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Ken Udas has been singing Stephen’s praises for quite some time now, and I finally got to meet him and hear him talk about his e-Learning Maturity Model at FIT not too long ago. It’s fascinating stuff; one of the most robust organizational capability assessments for e-Learning that I’ve seen while still managing to remain lightweight enough to be practical. I have invited Stephen to blog about eMM here, along with anything else that strikes his fancy. (If we’re lucky, maybe he’ll share some of his interesting perspective on e-Learning standards, for example.)

    Stephen will be blogging here over the next three weeks. Since I will also continue blogging during that time period, I have asked Stephen to make obvious which posts are his. Keep an eye out for them; I’m sure they’ll be good stuff.

  • FAS's Kay Howell on the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act

    Federation of American Scientists’ Kay Howell, who authored the research roadmap for the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act, has a column in eLearn explaining why passage of the act is so critical:

    Today’s students are not only comfortable with technology-they know how to use it effectively to solve problems, find resources, and build networks of people with shared interests. So why do we send them to places of learning and ask them to leave their technology tools at home? Why do the cookies on my ten-year old daughter’s computer know more about what she likes to read and how she likes to locate information than does her teacher?

    The answer, unfortunately, is fairly simple: As a nation we’ve been unwilling to make the investments necessary to give our kids and their teachers the same productivity tools used in the computer, pharmaceutical, energy, and other industries. The federal government funds substantial research and development (R&D) initiatives that translate into advancements in key US industries-and those investments pay off handsomely. Federally funded R&D, performed mostly in US colleges and universities, leads to improved productivity through better processes, products, and services, and the graduate students that participate in the R&D eventually end up as workers in the related industries. It’s a great model that has served our country well.

    Unfortunately, there is no such R&D model for the education sector.

    It’s a good read. And once again, I urge you to write your congresspeople in support of the bill and get your friends and colleagues to do the same.

  • The Economic Impact of the Blackboard Patent Suit

    One of the topics that I’ve been meaning to get to since EDUCAUSE is the likely impact of the patent suit on the financial health of Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and the other LMS players. I got to talk to a number of university decision-makers and observe the activity at the booths of various LMS vendors. My conclusion? In the short term, both Blackboard and D2L are likely to do just fine. However, a slowdown 9-12 months out is likely.

    (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Postscript

    Now that there are a number of LMOS/framework-like projects in active development (the Bodington Tetra/Sakai collaboration, Oracle’s AEI, LAMS’ service contract work and, of course, the venerable eFramework and all of its children), I thought it might be interesting to pause for a moment consider how what I’ve learned about Bodington reflects on the challenges of an LMOS-like approach. When we think of frameworks, conversations tend in the direction plugging in tools, as if everything else in the framework itself is fairly straightforward. But the Bodington/Sakai unification project shows that picture to be simplistic. Simply taking Bod’s tooks and plugging them into Sakai’s environment would basically remove everything Bodingtonish about Bodington. Permissions, page layout control (which is related to how tools present themselves in the environment), and UI metaphors all really matter.

    So how do we define the territory that needs to be considered in order to make a framework approach work? How do we figure out what’s important? I don’t know that I have answers to those questions, but I think the solution may well start with use cases. What we need is a library of relatively granular descriptions of what teachers and students do in Bodington (for example) so that we can think about the affordances required to support those activities. The use cases might eventually be built into a pattern language. This approach combined with a catalog of tools, tool capabilities, and tool interoperability contracts, would probably give us enough to have meaningful conversations about building common frameworks.

  • The EDUCAUSE Letter to Blackboard is Now Public

    Insider Higher Ed has let us know that the EDUCAUSE board has published its letter to Blackboard. This is such a remarkable (and courageous) letter that I feel compelled to reproduce it below in its entirety: (more…)

  • Bodington Review, Part II

    In my last post, I discussed Bodington’s unique access control system and how this affects teaching affordances. I started there deliberately and at the suggestion of my Bodington expert and guide, Oxford University’s Paul Trafford. Today, Stephen Downes comments sarcastically, “Yes, that’s what we all look for first when trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” And that’s exactly the point. Bodington’s most compelling strengths as a learning environment are precisely not what we tend to look at first when “trying to decide whether an LMS is worth the effort.” (Not that assessing whether Bodington was “worth the effort” was my goal in any case.) As we all know, seemingly subtle implementation details can have disproportionate impact on the quality of the learning environment. Permissions is one of those unfortunately obscure areas that LMS developers often get wrong and, as Paul had suggested would be the case, I immediately saw that Bod’s system opened up pedagogical possibilities that are not practical on other systems. For example, Bodington appears to support very sophisticated multi-role groupwork, including but not limited to simulations, that would be much harder to do in learning environments with less flexible permissions systems. Is this difference important enough to look at first? I guess that depends on what you are looking for.

    Be warned: I’m going to continue my review by looking at other aspects of Bodington that are also not the kinds of things people typically look at first when trying to decide “whether an LMS is worth the effort”. If what you’re looking for is a generic LMS review, then don’t bother reading further and consider starting at the Edutools page for it instead. (more…)