e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Interview With Casey Green

    The 2010 Campus Computing survey is out, and it’s chock full of interesting information. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Casey Green, the Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, and talk about some of the highlights and a few related topics. I apologize for the abrupt ending; my camera ran out of disk space in the middle of Casey’s last answer. In any event, there’s good stuff here about the transition happening in the LMS market, the challenges of getting good survey data, ((Many thanks to the ever-thoughtful Scott Siddall for suggesting this line of inquiry.)) and more.

    You should definitely also read the survey report. It covers a lot of topics that we didn’t even touch on in the interview.

  • New Blog About SOA and Higher Education from Oracle Employees

    Some Oracle colleagues and I have started a new blog about service-oriented architecture (SOA) in higher education in general and with regard to Peoplesoft Campus Solutions in particular. ((The usual disclaimer applies: The views expressed on that blog (like this one) are solely the authors’ own and do not reflect those of Oracle Corporation.)) We’re just getting started and would love to hear from people about what they’d like us to write about.

    Check it out: http://serviceorientedcampus.com/.

  • Pre-EDUCAUSE Announcements and Other Odds and Ends

    We’re in that period leading up to EDUCAUSE when everybody makes their big announcements. Two caught my eye as being relevant to e-Literate; I’m sure there will be more.

    First, Blackboard announced some improved integration of Wimba and Elluminate with competing LMS platforms. I argued previously that there’s good reason to believe that they would live up to their promise of continuing to support such integrations, and now we have the evidence. Several Wimba products now support the cross-platform IMS Basic LTI integration standard, and Elluminate now has a new (or improved?) Moodle-specific integration connector. As Blackboard continues to widen their portfolio of products, I think you’ll see more and more about them actively working with competing LMS providers.

    Second, Desire2Learn announced progress on their mobile support. I’ve been meaning to blog about their efforts in this area since they announced their plans at their conference this summer, but I just haven’t managed to get around to it before now. Like Blackboard and Moodle, D2L is pursuing a belt-and-suspenders approach to mobile by building out both phone-specific apps (Blackberry and iPhone for sure; they’ve hinted about Android but I don’t know if they’ve announced anything about it explicitly yet) and a device-independent HTML-based mobile interface. As I have written before, this strikes me as an expensive strategy. But I guess if you can’t be sure which way the market is going to go in an important area like mobile, you invest the resources necessary to hedge your bets. Anyway, what I appreciate about D2L’s current press release is that they tell you exactly what subset of LMS functionality their mobile interface supports. None of these mobile apps are going to do everything that their native interface does at this point, and the details can really matter. I’d love to see a feature list like this one from all the LMS providers.

    I’ll be at EDUCAUSE on Wednesday and Thursday and hope to come back with some tidbits and possibly some interviews to share. If you want to try to catch up with me while I’m there, your best bet is probably to go to the community source reception.

    One last non-EDUCAUSE-related tidbit: If you haven’t watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Blackboard’s VP of Mobile Kayvon Beykpour, you should. Beykpour founded the company Terribly Clever that Blackboard acquired for its mobile academic portal. In the interview, he proves himself to be…well…terribly clever. He has some interesting insights into where the academic mobile space is going, and Scoble does a good job of asking the right questions.

  • The Sakai/Jasig Merger Proposal

    You may or may not have seen the recent press release with the headline, “Jasig and Sakai Foundations to Pursue Merger.” It’s a big deal. I am on the joint Sakai/Jasig committee that put this proposal together, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d like to fill you in on what the deal is and why, in my personal opinion, it’s a really good idea.

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  • Migrating to Sakai

    When I speak to people from schools that are currently involved in an LMS selection process, I very often hear the following assumptions and line of reasoning:

    • Sakai 2 hasn’t set the world on fire, and anyway, it’s going to be replaced by Sakai 3 soon.
    • But Sakai 3 isn’t ready yet, and we aren’t sure exactly when it will be ready or how to go about evaluating it now.
    • Since we have to make a decision soon, we are going to have to forget Sakai as a candidate.

    This is a reasonable and understandable train of thought, but it is built upon mistaken beliefs about Sakai 2, Sakai 3, and the relationship between the two projects. The Sakai community has a vision and a plan that ensures both Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 will remain healthy and under active development for some time to come. In fact, far from being merely an awkwardly timed product transition, the two-product approach the community is taking actually provides what I believe is a unique strategy in the LMS space for supporting schools’ present needs, fulfilling their vision for their future, and providing a path from one to the other. Rather than being a reason to dismiss Sakai from consideration, the Sakai 2/Sakai 3 dichotomy is actually reason to look at the Sakai community and family of software especially closely.

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  • SunGard Delivers Sakai Support Through rSmart Partnership

    This is pretty big news. SunGard will be providing Sakai support services to its customers. If you’re interested in Sakai, you can contract with SunGard to get help migrating, setting up integration, and training faculty, as well as ongoing hosting and support. They’ll be doing this, in part, through a partnership in which rSmart is basically subcontracted by SunGard to provide the hosting and support subscription services. This is great news for both companies, SunGard’s customers, and the Sakai community in general, the latter of which I expect to expand substantially because of this development. But this also provides a textbook case of just how well open source and open standards can work to provide better offerings in the marketplace when they are working well. People who don’t have experience with them—particularly with open source—often scratch their heads at how they can possibly work out. In fact, open source allows for the unbundling of services that are typically tied together in a private source vendor model, opening up new possibilities for business models and risk management strategies. Open standards enhance that flexibility while creating new opportunities for collaboration among even competing vendors.

    Let’s take a closer look at how this deal works for each of the parties involved.

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  • Great OER Presentation in Eastern Mass Next Week

    My good friends and fellow SUNY escapees Steven Zucker and Beth Harris will be giving a talk about their amazing art history open educational resources website smARThistory on Friday, October 1st at UMassOnline. There are several reasons why this talk is worth attending. First, smARThistory is simply one of the best OER collections I know of, both in terms of the quality of the individual OERs and in terms of the extensive scaffolding on the site to help both teachers and students weave the content together into coherent and personalized curricula. Second, Steven and Beth are both great, highly entertaining presenters. And third, there probably will be food.

    Register here.