e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Some Things You Should Do

    1. If you have any spare change, give a few dollars to the DS106 Kickstarter project. They may have exceeded their initial funding goal, but Jim is going to write up some ideas of what he would do if he had more money and post them to the Kickstarter site. I’m guessing he can come up with an idea or three.
    2. If you are a large for-profit education company—say, an LMS vendor or a textbook company—give $5,000 to the DS106 Kickstarter project. At that level of contribution, in addition to all the benefits of the lower levels, you’ll get a mention as doing a really swell thing on the fabulous e-Literate weblog.
    3. If you are a mobile apps developer interested in education, enter the Desire2Learn Build Something That Matters challenge. It doesn’t even have to integrate with D2L. This is a great initiative by Desire2Learn, and I will be one of the contest judges.
    4. If you’re within driving distance of the greater Boston area and have time on April 12th, come to the NERCOMP Northeast Open Initiatives event in Norwood, MA. I will be a panelist. Not that anything interesting has been happening in educational open source lately, but I’m sure we’ll think of something to talk about.

  • Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms and Netspot

    Press release is here.

    This is obviously a gob smacker of a story. I’m going to take a few days, talk to a few folks, and think about the implications before I write a reaction post. You may hear from other e-Literate bloggers on the subject in the meantime.

    Stay tuned.

  • Classroom Salon: Social Highlighting for Education

    As educational content moves increasingly digital, one of the big pushes is to rethink highlighting and margin notes. On the downside, these capabilities are seen as table stakes. If students can’t do with their digital textbooks what they can already do with their analog textbooks, then that’s a step backward. On the upside, there’s a sense that highlighting and annotation is an opportunity to re-think educational affordances, particularly if you add social capabilities into the mix. But, for the most part, social highlighting has been a bust so far. Tools like Diigo have had them for some time now, and I just don’t see a lot of adoption. Even the teaching with Web 2.0 crowd doesn’t seem to have latched onto to these capabilities in a substantial way. Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of strong, core educational use cases informing the design.

    Classroom Salon—a product developed at Carnegie Mellon University with funding from the NSF and the Gates Foundation—is different. It has a few key features that make it stand out from the pack as a great tool for teaching critical reading and writing.

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  • GoodSemester: Not an LMS, but a Learning Platform

    A while back here on e-Literate, Phil wrote a post called Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform. In it, he wrote,

    In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

    What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

    There tends to be a pendulum swings in technology. In the old days, there were dumb terminals, with all the business logic residing on the mainframe. Then came the PC revolution, pushing functionality out to the edges of the network. Next came the internet, driving functionality back to the server. And now we have apps. Similarly, in educational technology, we started with a few tools, moved to an all-in-one, all-you-can-eat LMS model, and now are moving back toward more specialized systems. And one of the questions platform developers and teachers a like are asking is how much functionality do you really need? Is it just WordPress? Is it WordPress plus Google Docs? Is it WordPress, Google Docs, and grade book? Is it a simple LMS with only a handful of tools and an app store? There are lots of different models.

    Enter GoodSemester, which has its own take on…well…just about everything. I had a chance to talk to company founder Jason Rappaport a while back about both the product and the company.

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  • New e-Literate Featured Blogger: Rob Reynolds

    I’m pleased to announce that Rob Reynolds, formerly of the Xplanation blog and now of the Next Is Now blog, will be joining the e-Literate cast of featured bloggers. Rob is an old hand in the textbook publishing business and somebody I have learned a lot from personally in terms of how technology is changing that industry.

    Welcome aboard, Rob.

  • Cengage Learning: It Gets Better

    I don’t always agree with my employer’s political stances, but this is one that makes me proud:

    Thanks to Jane Snyder for pointing this out to me.

  • My UnKeynote

    NERCOMP is holding an unconference on the LMS in Worcester, MA on March 5th. I will be delivering the unkeynote on the unLMS. Since it is an unkeynote, I will tell the audience nothing important about the LMS, instead relying on them to have more of the answers than I do.

    In other words, it’s a lot like a regular keynote, only we’re more honest about it.