e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard wins clearance to buy WebCT

    Looks like the Blackboard/WebCT merger has been approved:

    FEB. 6 10:36 A.M. ET Blackboard Inc., an education software developer, said Monday it received clearance from the Department of Justice to buy WebCT Inc., a rival provider of Internet learning software, and expects to close the deal in March or April.

    Up until now, I believe the two companies have been legally bound not to work together too closely or make public statements about detailed post-merger plans. I’m not sure if the gag comes off immediately upon Justice Department approval or only after the merger has been officially consumated, but either way we should be hearing more detailed plans through official channels relatively soon now.

    This should be interesting.

  • Calling All SUNY Edubloggers

    I have often referred to the smARThistory home page by SUNY colleagues Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. I have now added to my blogroll a second SUNY edublog, Learning Curve, written by the dark and mysterious MIDizen X.

    I would like to start a SUNY-specific edublogroll, but I need your help. If you are an edublogger at SUNY or know of any edubloggers at SUNY, please let me know.

  • When Worldviews Collide

    About a year and a half ago, I made a plea for people with two very different worldviews–one from an enterprise perspective and the other from an internet perspective–to start talking to each other regarding application design goals. I’m delighted to see that conversation happening right here on this blog. There is a great conversation going on as the result of the little squabble Stephen Downes and I just had. On the one side, you have the proponents of the internet worldview who want less system control and more freedom in their learning environments. On the other side, you have proponents of the enterprise worldview, who want to be able to assure their users of stability, consistency, and privacy.

    This is precisely the tension that the LMOS aims to resolve. By providing a flexible framework based on a solid enterprise architecture and adhering religiously to open, low-barrier-of-entry interoperability standards, we hope to, on the one hand, create an ecosystem in which specialized teaching tools can be developed rapidly in a grassroots way and, on the other hand, enable organizations to selectively lock down parts of the environment as needed based on sound policy drivers such as privacy rights and security.

    Yummy!

  • Stephen Downes Missed the Point

    OK, so Stephen Downes doesn’t like the LMOS:

    I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Mark Feldstein said “We don’t just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them.” And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I’ll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as ‘upload a file and base a discussion thread on it’. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That’s it – if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.

    I’m going to ignore the fact that he got my first name wrong. Frankly, I think language like “ridiculous” and “absurd” is unnecessarily hyperbolic when used in reference to a plan that simply articulates a language-specific implementation of fairly widely established standards for enterprise systems in general and enterprise learning frameworks in particular. It’s also not terribly collegial or respectful. And finally, it doesn’t reflect a grasp of the problems we are trying to solve. (more…)

  • iTunes University and the LMOS

    There’s been a lot of buzz (some positive and some negative) about Apple’s iTunes University. I’m pleased to say that I will be traveling with a number of SUNY colleagues to 1 Infinite Loop the week after next, where we will hear more about the program. I promise to blog about what I learn. In the meantime, I’d like to sketch out an idea that Patrick Masson and I have been batting around about how iTunes U could fit into an LMOS. (more…)

  • Why Mashups Make the LMOS

    Regular readers know that I’ve been flogging the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) pretty hard. The other day, LMOS partner-in-crime Patrick Masson and I published an article about the need to make LMS’s mash-up-friendly. Well, today, ZDNet editor David Berlind effectively connects the dots between the article and the LMOS concept. (more…)

  • Two New Articles in e-Learn

    I just had two new articles published in e-Learn Magazine. The first one, A Call to Arms, is an opinion piece arguing that we urgently need more direct faculty-technologist collaboration in LMS design if we are to make any kind of reasonable progress. The second one, which I co-authored with my colleague Patrick Masson, is an attempt to lead by example. In Unbolting the Chairs: Making Learning Management Systems More Flexible, we pair up as a teacher and a technologist to argue for changes in LMS design that would facilitate better support of the long tail of learning applications.