e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Ian Dolphin Appointed Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation

    I’m delighted to announce that Ian Dolphin is Sakai’s new Executive Director. Ian is an old hand in the community, having served two terms on the Foundation Board. He’s no stranger to open source and open education, having served on the boards for Jasig and Curriki as well. Most recently, he worked at the JISC in the UK, coordinating the multi-national eFramework project. Ian is a great guy who brings lots of relevant experience, an international perspective and, above all, the passion of a lifelong educator to the job.

    During the job search process, the Foundation really had an embarrassment of riches in terms of qualified applicants from both inside and outside the Sakai community. There were several candidates who I thought would have made fine choices that didn’t even make the first interview cut. The fact that Ian rose to the top of this impressive group says something about both his strengths in general and the fit between those strengths and the needs of the community at this juncture.

  • Vacation and Other Travel

    My lovely wife and I will be taking a vacation next week, so there will be no e-Literate updates for a week (unless I can squeeze a post in tomorrow before we go). The week after that, I’ll be at the Sakai conference and hope to snag a video interview or two while I’m there. If you’re going to be at the Sakai conference and want to catch up with me, feel free to ping me via email or Twitter. The same holds true for the Desire2Learn Fusion conference and the Campus Technology conference, both of which I will be attending. We’ll be renting a camper in a renting place at Brisbane, we are so exited to get to travel around Australia by ourselves, we already got the Best Cooler as well, to make sure we have it full of beverages the whole time.

    If you do track me down, I ask one favor. I am horrible at remembering names or faces. It causes me a lot of embarrassment. If we have met before, please don’t be offended if I don’t recognize you or remember you at first. I’m pretty good about remembering conversations, so if you give me a little context, it will probably all come back to me. Sorry about that.

  • Moodle 2: File Import from and Export to Cloud Apps

    Gavin Henrick has a useful blog that publishes information about the ongoing development of Moodle 2. I was particularly interested in how Moodle will handle sharing files with consumer web apps like Google Docs and Flickr. Lucky for me, Gavin has a couple of screencasts covering the topic. Here’s some info about importing docs from external repositories:

    It’s a pretty intuitive UI that borrows heavily from desktop file picking interfaces. Moodle 2 integrates with an impressive list of external repositories:

    • YouTube
    • Alfresco
    • Box.net
    • Flickr
    • Google Docs
    • Mahara
    • MERLOT
    • Picasa
    • Remote Moodle installations
    • Amazon S3
    • WebDAV repositories
    • Wikimedia servers
    • File systems

    The repository API supports plugins for other repositories, so this list should grow over time.

    Moodle 2 also supports export to repositories in either HTML or LEAP2A format:

    This is also nicely done, but it doesn’t go far enough, in my view. A fundamental flaw in LMS design is that the course, rather than the student, owns course documents. While it’s great that Moodle makes it easy to export course contributions to places where students can hold onto them after the course gets archived, this mechanism relies on students making specific efforts to save their work. I would prefer to see a system in which the canonical copies of student-created course documents (or faculty-created course documents, for that matter) live in the users’ private file storage space and the course instance is granted permission to access them. By default, students hold onto all of their contributions after the course is archived.

    At any rate, if this is representative of the kind of improvement that is going into Moodle 2, it is likely to be an impressive release.

  • Digital Visitors and Digital Residents

    Thanks to Laura Czerniewicz for pointing me to this excellent video discussion by Oxford’s David White:

    This isn’t really a full-on replacement of Prensky’s concept of digital natives (which is unfortunate, since I agree Prensky tends to be reduced to “old people just don’t understand this stuff”), but I think it’s a useful formulation of the divide between people who get value out of social networks and those that don’t. The short version for those of you who don’t have time to watch the video (although it is well worth your 15 minutes) is that digital residents see the web as a social space while digital visitors see it as a collection of tools. This has pretty profound implications for the differences between whether and how these two groups use particular technologies.

    One of the more important points that David makes, in my view, is the link between your decision to be either a resident or a visitor and your ideology of education. If you believe that education is private affair between you, your books, and your professor, then you’re not likely to see the value of Facebook, Twitter, Elgg, or some other social networking platform in furthering your education. This actually links to another of David’s posts, “Does the Technology Matter,” in which he highlights two camps of instructional technologists: one that argues the technology should be transformational and the other that argues the technology should be invisible. It seems to me there’s a reason why there’s a high degree of overlap between people who are attracted to social networking, PLE’s and the like, and people who are interested in supplanting traditional pedagogies and institutions with more self-directed networked learning. Most people who fit David’s definition of a digital resident can probably remember their conversion experiences. For me, I had to be hit over the head several times. I used to think that blogging, Twitter, and Facebook were all idiotic, narcissistic wastes of time. (Well, OK, I still think Facebook is a kinda stupid.) In each case, I had a conversion experience in which I came to realize how the utility of the tool is not so much in what it enables me to do but in how it changes the way I want to be. I learned new behaviors and habits that I found to be productive and fulfilling. I learned to ask questions that I probably wouldn’t have asked otherwise, to reach out to more people more often for help, and to rely much more on the intelligence of my friends and colleagues to help me on my intellectual (and social) journey. These changes are intimately related to the ways in which we learn. I think it’s no surprise that people who are digital residents also tend to see technology as a catalyst of educational reform.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part V

    This is the fifth and final installment from our friends at the University of North Carolina:

  • DIY U: 'POP!' Goes the Bubble

    A while back, I suggested that there might be a bubble in the higher education market, and that students taking on large amounts of debt to go to non-elite schools could be analogous to sub-prime mortgage customers. Well, somebody else has picked up on the theme, and that somebody is none other than Steven Eisman, a hedge fund manager featured in The Big Short as one of the few people who made tons of money by betting against the housing market before it crashed. In particular, he is pointing to the for-profit education providers as the sub-prime lenders and claims that the bubble could pop if Congress tightens lending rules:

    “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry” said Eisman, 47, one of the sellers featured in “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (Norton, 2010), Michael Lewis’s book about investors who anticipated the housing bust. “I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.”…

    “Default rates are already starting to skyrocket,” Eisman said at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, in New York. “It’s just like subprime, which grew at any cost and kept weakening its underwriting standards to grow.”

    Just as bond-rating firms gave high grades to securities backed by risky mortgages, so the accrediting associations responsible for monitoring educational quality of for-profit colleges don’t provide thorough and independent scrutiny, said Eisman. Because accreditation is a peer-review system, in many instances representatives of for-profit colleges sit on the board of the body that certifies them, he said.

    The whole article is worth reading.

    “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry” said Eisman, 47, one of the sellers featured in “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (Norton, 2010), Michael Lewis’s book about investors who anticipated the housing bust. “I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.”

  • Lots of News in the IMS Standards World

    Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards.

    This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards:

    • Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the full draft is now ready for public review. I have written about this standard a few times before. Basically, it fixes many of the current problems with SIS/LMS integration and provides a more general means of provisioning class roster information into any application that needs it. LIS makes it easier for schools to move to support multiple LMSs, move to a different LMS, or make it easier for faculty and students to use non-LMS collaboration tools for classes. Expect more announcements about increased adoption of the standard in the coming months.
    • Basic Learning Tool Interoperability Finalized: This is a standard for proxying learning tools into your LMS/portal/PLE/whatever-unified-learning-environment-you-please. Think of Basic LTI as a lightweight, cross-platform answer to Blackboard Building Blocks/WebCT PowerLinks/Moodle Modules/whatever. Full LTI, which supports more complex use cases at the cost of a more complex implementation, is in the works.
    • Access For All 2.0 Finalized: AFA is an accessibility standard that has actually been around since 2003. However, it has since been submitted and adopted as an ISO standard and was modified significantly in the process. AFA 2.0 harmonizes the IMS standard with the ISO version of the standard.
    • Common Cartridge Adopted by Textbook Publishers to Support Tennessee Board of Regents: This is pretty big news. Standards generally don’t get traction unless customers demand that they be supported by their vendors. In this case, the Tennessee Board of Regents told the various textbook publishers that they expected course content for the high-enrollment general education requirements courses to be published in Common Cartridge format. Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, means the end of platform-specific course cartridges. It also potentially means that faculty migrating their courses from one system to another, either because they change schools or because their schools are changing LMSs, will have a much easier time of it. This latter bit will only happen if and when LMS platforms support Common Cartridge export, so be sure yo demand this from your vendor or your open source community.