e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • 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.

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Laura Czerniewicz

    With all the blogging I’ve been doing about mLearning apps the past couple of weeks, it has bothered me that the focus in the industry right now has been on the high-end devices. How many people in the entire world own an iPad right now? Maybe 300,000? I really wanted to learn more about how we can use the least-common-denominator cell phones that six out of every ten people own worldwide. I wanted to learn more about how mobile learning works in places where everyone doesn’t have an iPhone.

    I am pleased to announce that Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) at the University of Cape Town, will be writing a series of guest posts to educate us in this area. I have been a fan of Laura’s on Twitter and, more recently, her blog. You may also be interested in her bio and her research.

  • Non-functional

    You may not have noticed, but e-Literate had a brief outage yesterday which was fixed for me by the good folks at my ISP, SiteGround. Meanwhile, e-Literate‘s operator (i.e., me) has been experiencing a longer outage due to a nasty bout of bronchitis. I am starting to feel slightly more human today and will begin catching up on the backblog this weekend, starting with a treat—a guest post from our old friend Jim Farmer. I’ll also have a couple of shorter, newsy posts, after which I hope to get back to writing some decent-sized pieces.

    Sorry for the long quiet period.

  • End of an Era

    Now that the Blackboard/D2L patent fight is over, I am taking down the edupatent feed harvester, which never worked particularly well anyway. Mostly what showed up in the feed were my own posts, which you can still access by going to the edupatents tag.

  • Sakai Blogging

    I have been thinking a bit about how my new roles on the Sakai Foundation Board and Product Council intersect with my role as a blogger. To be clear, I intend to maintain my independence on e-Literate. I will continue to praise other platforms when I see something praiseworthy, and to speak out when I see something in the Sakai community that I think could be better.

    That said, one way in which I might be able to usefully combine the two worlds is to use e-Literate as a platform for increased transparency into the Sakai community. There’s a lot going on that isn’t always obvious to many community members, never mind the general public. I’m going to do my best to bring some of these goings on to broader attention. And obviously, I wouldn’t be volunteering for the roles I’ve taken on if I didn’t believe in Sakai—both the software and the community.

    All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I will be posting more about Sakai going forward, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing about other platforms.

  • Please Re-subscribe to My Feed

    Update: Feedburner has been restored. For now. Nevertheless, I recommend that you subscribe to the orginal URL below. When Feedburner is working, your reader should automatically get forwarded. When it’s not, your feed should still work.

    Feedburner is screwed up, so if you are subscribing directly to that URL, you may not be getting updates in your RSS reader. Please resubscribe to https://eliterate.us/feed/.

    Sorry about that. Serves me right for relying on Google.

  • What Makes It Great?

    When I was in college, I was very fortunate to have Rob Kapilow as a choral conductor and music history professor. Rob has an uncanny knack for boiling down the brilliance of a piece of music so that anyone could hear it in just a short snippet. “Anyone else would have written this,” he’d say, playing four or five bars of familiar but uninspiring music, “but Mozart wrote this.” He’d play the same four or five bars, changing one note, or one chord, or one rhythm, and suddenly you would understand. It was a revelation every time. Rob has gone on to become a star on NPR and PBS, with a series called What Makes It Great. (I highly recommend the podcast.) I have never forgotten my experiences in his classroom and his choir.

    Which brings me to the present. I’m toying with the idea of doing a “What Makes It Great?” series with educational technology, starting with LMSs but not necessarily ending there. It would work something like this:

    • I would work with a product vendor or open source community representative. 
    • I would solicit from that person and from my readers the one or two features that really make that platform stand out as a teaching tool.
    • I would then do a 10-minute screencast and interview with the person demonstrating those features.

    That’s the basic idea, but I have a few questions. First of all, are you interested in something like this? If you are a user of a platform, would you be willing to suggest ideas? If you are a vendor or open source community member, would you be willing to partner with me on an episode? Do you have any suggestions to fine-tune the idea?

    My other concern is technical. I have had absolutely lousy luck in the past when I have tried to record interviews. It is hideously embarassing to have to tell your guest, “Well, that was a terrific conversation, but I’m afraid that it’s been lost forever.” Does anybody have good suggestions for idiot-proof system by which I can capture both a screencast and a phone interview (since I expect to do these remotely)? I need something that can make a 10-minute recording, so that rules out Jing.