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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Social Software in an Academic Context is Hard
A couple of things have gotten me musing about social lately. The first was Dave Cormier’s thought-provoking blog post about how PLEs are supposed to disaggregate power, not people. The second was a private conversation with a friend who is thinking hard about how to add a social layer to an existing LMS. And the […]
The Future of the LMS
Here’s the ninety-minute video and slides from a presentation I made to UMassOnline1 last month called W(h)ither the LMS? It’s a fairly institution- and enterprise-centric vision, but it has the potential to cohabitate rather nicely with more distributed, informal personal learning networks. Formal and informal educational paths should co-exist and cross each other in a […]
How to Sell a Migration to Moodle
The folks at Wesleyan University have a blog up that is a stellar example of how to evangelize for an LMS platform to faculty when you’re facing the front end of a migration.1 For starters, their FAQ is rich with information, including analysis by peer schools. Here’s a sample: Another great example is UNC’s Sakai […]
Social Learning and the Re-bundling of the College Experience
Just a couple of hours after I posted on social network analysis and the LMS, Scott Wilson tweeted about an article from Wired Magazine that he correctly identified as having serious implications for social learning. An economic sociologist from MIT used social network analysis to show that behaviors spread more quickly in social networks of […]