If you have never been involved with an open source project, one of the great sources of mystification (and anxiety) for you might be how a group of people spread out all over the world with a wide range of motivations can come together to work on a complex project and produce something coherent and […]
Moodle for iPhone Demo
Here’s an interesting (and unusually high production value) video of an iPhone mobile interface for Moodle: Moodle also has a Java-based cross-platform mobile client which is not as pretty but seems to have decent functionality. (My impression is that this is fairly similar to the state of affairs with Blackboard’s mobile clients.) You can see […]
Sakai 3: The Benefits of 'Everything is Content'
One of the more radical departures that Sakai 3 makes from traditional LMS design is that everything in the system is treated as content. A traditional LMS is an aggregation of tools—discussion boards, grade books, test engines, wikis, assignment drop boxes, etc.—each of which has its own data model in a relational database. It’s really […]
Michael Korcuska Moving On, Lois Brooks Stepping Up
Update: Lois Brooks now has a blog post up about the transition as well. Well, I’m sad but not surprised to report that Michael Korcuska has been wooed by an organization with deep pockets to take on a very important role. The founder of LinkedIn, who is apparently a personal friend of Michael’s, invited him […]
Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support
Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one […]
Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine
Brian Moynihan has posted his Masters Thesis on University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s LMS evaluation, which eventually came down to a shootout between Blackboard and Unicon-supported Sakai. There’s a lot that’s of interest in this paper, particularly around the complexity of higher ed IT environments and the need for integration, but these two […]
Sakai, Small Schools, and Pedagogy
Update: Michael Korcuska has a blog post up about some small colleges that have been successful with Sakai. Sakai has a reputation for being technology-driven and focused on the needs of large research universities. There was some truth to both of those claims in the early years of the project. However, the recent election of […]