e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • ePort(able)Folios

    Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a conference on ePortfolios at SUNY Brockport. Unfortunately, the audio on WebEX apparently died early on, so there is no online archive available. It’s too bad. It was a great conference.

    Anyway, I’ve said on a number of occasions that ePortfolios are a lot like artificial intelligence in that they will be only a year away for the next ten years. But the conversation at the conference made me realize that I haven’t got it quite right. The real problem is that, for all the many different definitions of ePortfolios out there, we have a bizillion different sets of application requirements which are not being looked at holistically. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.

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  • British Columbia Distance Learning Program Recommending Moodle

    According to Robert Fitzgerald, BCcampus, which is an organization that supports distance learning for a number of schools in British Columbia, is recommending that they should support Moodle at an equal level as WebCT:

    We recommend that BCcampus support a provincial implementation of Moodle for all public educational institutions at the same level of support as currently provided for WebCT. Based on the investigations and implementations of Moodle at the local level of institutions involved in this collaborative project, as well as a province-wide Moodle pilot, we believe that Moodle is a viable alternative to WebCT as an on-line Course Management System (CMS).

    Moodle is quickly turning into a juggernaut.

  • Presenting at EDUCAUSE

    Ken Udas and I had our half-day workshop proposal accepted for EDUCAUSE 2006. The workshop is called A Level Playing Field: How to Evaluate Open and Proprietary LMSs Using the Same Criteria, and it will be drawing heavily on the BRR framework. Here’s the description of the workshop:

    When selecting a Learning Management System, decisions are often based on generalizations about the advantages and disadvantages of Open Source software relative to commercial options. Without an appropriate evaluation model, critical strengths or weaknesses of individual Open Source alternatives may be overlooked resulting in an incomplete comparison of the available options.

    In this hands-on workshop, attendees will practice applying the Organizational Readiness Rating (ORR) model, which is based on a model
    developed by Carnegie Mellon University and SpikeSource, to the domain of learning management software selection. Attendees will engage in a facilitated software evaluation process of three learning management systems. including both commercial and open source options. They will also discuss the ORR model in relation to some of the characteristics oftheir home organizations that were uncovered during the evaluation process and how those characteristics may impact software selection.

  • Microsoft Takes the Lead on Openness (?!)

    Microsoft recently announced that they are making the issue register (i.e., bug tracker) for Internet Explorer public. Yes, there are a few hoops you need to jump through in order to see it, but basically anyone can now see the open bugs around IE. This is a big deal. As Washington Post technology security columnist Brian Krebs has pointed out, Microsoft takes an average of 46 days to patch critical security vulnerabilities (and 135 days for bug fixes in general) while Mozilla takes an average of 23 days to patch similar flaws, with a third of them patched in under 10 days. (There are some caveats to these numbers noted in the articles, but the basic gap is pretty soundly documented.) A recent study [PDF] from Carnegie Mellon found that Open Source projects typically patch security vulnerabilities 60% faster than proprietary vendors. I don’t have the data to prove that this applies to other kinds of bugs as well but it seems logical to infer that it would.

    LMS vendors should take note of this data and of Microsoft’s leadership in opening up their database of open issues.

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  • A Survey Worth Taking

    My colleague Alexandra Pickett called my attention to this Trends and Vendor Satisfaction Survey by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). It takes less than the advertised 30 minutes to complete. If you’re involved with higher education and instructional technology in any way, it’s probably worth your time.

  • IBM Follows SUNY's Lead on Notes/Domino Migration

    Ya know, you can’t make this stuff up.

    As regular readers know, the SUNY Learning Network is currently on a home-grown LMS built on top of Lotus Notes/Domino. About eight months back, we proposed [PDF] the notion of migrating to a standards-based Java portal backed by a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, this week, IBM announced details of Domino Next, the successor platform to Lotus Domino. And what is that architecture? A standards-based Java portal. Basically, their strategy for migrating their customers to a successor technology is the same one that we came up with. And they’re doing it in a semi-versionless way. Meanwhile, the same day, another article comes out saying that IBM completed 1800 SOA projects for a thousand customers last year—double of what it had been the previous year.

    I’m glad to see that IBM is following our example.

  • More Offline Toys

    Today I’m trying out Blogjet. In contrast to ecto, it has a somewhat simpler interface more reminiscent of a browser than an email client. Like ecto, it offers WYSIWYG:

    Blogjet

    Both seem like they would work fine for faculty.

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