e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Happy Birthday, e-Literate

    One year ago today, I posted my first entry in this blog. At the time, I was mainly just trying to think out loud about what interests me as I thought through my options regarding what I wanted to do next in my career. What has happened since has exceeded my wildest hopes. I have written over 250 posts, so just in terms of stimulating my thinking, it’s been incredibly fertile. But more importantly, there are signs that other people have also found the blog to be useful, or at least entertaining. e-Literate has had nearly 17,000 visitors to the site from across all six of Earth’s inhabited continents and has achieved a Technorati ranking of 21,717. It has motivated more than 150 comments and trackbacks. It has been nominated for several edublogger awards. This all is incredibly gratifying and motivating; if I had just been talking to myself, I’m sure I would have stopped blogging a long time ago. Even more gratifying has been the opportunity to meet many wonderful and fascinating people through the blog–many of them virtually and a few face-to-face. I have new friends and colleagues now.

    I want to thank each and every person who is reading this post. I started this blog for me, but I continue it for us. The knowledge that you are out there is the magic that keeps blogging a gratifying and fulfilling exercise for me.

    Rock on.

  • IE Browser Share For e-Literate Below 50 Percent

    For the first time since I started this blog, the browser share for IE has dropped below 50%. Here are the numbers:

    • Various versions of Internet Explorer 5.x and 6.x combined: 46.51%
    • Firefox 1.x: 37.18%
    • Safari 1.x: 6.99%
    • Everything else: 9ish%

    When I started this blog about a year ago, IE had upwards of 70% browser share, so this a pretty big slide over a 12-month period.

  • Is Sakai a Platform or a Product?

    Ben Brophy, a UI designer at MIT, muses about whether Sakai is a platform or a product. His initial answer is that it should be both. But he worries about the implications of having it as platform:

    The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what’s included as the ‘core tools’ will be made. The response I got from one board member was “I’d like to see Sakai include six discussion boards. The user can try them all and decide which they like best.” No other board member disagreed.

    That’s been bugging me ever since. Even assuming that each school’s IT department will pick a default set of tools (a possibility mentioned by the board member), does it make sense to have Sakai include every tool built? Can there be no standards for inclusion? If I’m developing a new attendance-taking tool that I want to be able to post grades, what do I do if there are 6 gradebooks?

    This isa problem, for sure. But it’s not one that I’d be looking to the Sakai community to solve for me. (more…)

  • NextGen Macromedia Flash Tool "Zorn" to Run on Eclipse

    This is interesting. According to Tim O’Reilly, Macromedia’s next Flash authoring tool will be built on the Eclipse Open Source IDE project. Eclipse’s offshoot, the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, has been used for a number of interesting online learning applications via the RELOAD project. (I’d love to see them add a QTI editor to the mix….)

    At any rate, Macromedia’s move is just another example of how the line is blurring between OSS and closed source. And again, I largely think this is a good thing.

  • SUNY Offering Online, Cross-Campus Electrical Engineering Degree

    Update: Here is a press release with a little more information.

    Well, it’s official. Three of SUNY’s 4 university centers (University at Buffalo, Stony Brook University, and Binghamton University) will jointly offer a fully online degree in electrical engineering. I’m told that this is the first degree of its kind. The program is being funded by Sloan-C.

    Congrats to my SUNY colleagues for pulling this together.

  • WebCT and Open Source

    James Farmer has a bee in his bonnet about the fact that WebCT is integrating Open Source components such as PHPWiki into the LMS. he writes,

    …[T]he essence is that WebCT, as far as I can tell, are now ‘integrating’ and are planning to integrate a huge swathe of open source tools essentially into WebCT so you can kiss your independent sandpit / development goodbye�. why would you want it when the ‘One Great Solution’ can provide it for everyone.

    I guess I see it a little differently. (more…)

  • "Signature Pedaogies" = Educational Pattern Languages?

    Chris Correa has a thought-provoking post on something called “signature pedagogies.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, shared some of the preliminary results from the foundation’s studies of professional education (including the education of lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others). He introduced the notion of signature pedagogies, or (as I understood it) the unique and prevalent ‘rules of engagement’ in the education in each of these domains.

    For example, there are certain activities and patterns of discourse that law students engage in that differ from the patterns experienced by medical students. In a law school lecture, a professor might begin a lecture with a “cold call” and ask a student to summarize and analyze some text. This process might be repeated several times so that students are summarizing other students’ contribution and generating their own analysis. This is one element that makes up the ‘signature pedagogy’ in the field of law.

    This sounds an awful lot like educational pattern languages to me. One thing I like about this approach is that it focuses on discipline-specific differences. Disciplinarity is one factor that absolutely should influence the educational patterns employed. (Learning styles/preferences, age level, and skill level are a few other factors that might have an impact.)

    Anyway, good stuff.