e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Khan Academy Contributes to the Google Art Project

    My friends Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, formerly of smARThistory, now of smARThistory at Khan Academy, have announced that they contributed 90 art history videos for the newly launched version 2 of the Google Art Project. This idea, of creating virtual versions of important museums around the globe, complete with high-resolution images of the art, is wonderful. Sadly, for me, the interface is a bit confusing and hard to navigate at times. (Frankly, I think Beth and Steven did a terrific job with the visual design of smARThistory; Google should be learning from them.) But still, this is an important effort that I hope Google continues to grow and improve.

    I also think it’s interesting to see this kind of partnership between Google and Khan to bring high-quality educational resources together. It may be an early example of what turns out to be a blossoming ecosystem of such partnerships. Let’s hope so.

  • Who Really Owns General Education Content (or Can Any Gen Ed Title Really Be Unique)?

    I want to begin this post with a few important disclaimers.

    I am not an attorney, even thought I do spend my fair share of time reviewing commenting on, and drafting language of contracts. In addition, I am not an expert on copyright, nor is this post really about copyright law or the nuances thereof per se. Finally, even though I am referencing the litigation filed by three major publishers against Boundless Learning (see the official complaint here), I am not concerned nor focused on any specific details related to that lawsuit. If you want further insight into the complaint and the companies involved, I suggest you consult these articles by Audrey Watters and/or Nick DeSantis.

    As further context for my comments, my intent is simply to raise philosophical questions related to general education textbook and course content, its origins, and the rights of ownership. I am approaching this topic as an author and researcher, instructor, former publishing executive, and educational technologist who has focused on OERs. While there may be legal aspects to the questions I raise, I will leave those in the legal profession to address them.

    With those introductions, let’s turn our attention to the litigation filed by Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan agains Boundless Learning. The complaint the publishers are bringing is related to copyright infringement, related specifically to Boundless textbooks created for Introduction to Biology, Introduction to Psychology, and Principles of Economics. The courses in which these textbooks can be used are among the top-selling course areas for textbooks in the U.S. While Principles of Economics is not technically a General Education course, it is a foundational or entry-level course that is focused on the core set of information that a student should know about Economics. (more…)

  • Summary of Statements by Key Players in Blackboard Announcement, Including Competitors

    Given all the news and discussion surrounding Blackboard’s strategy change last week, I thought that it would be useful to collect the public statements from Blackboard and their competitors in one place. No analysis, no interviews, just statements. I have a feeling that this might provide a rich source of analysis 6 – 12 months from now.

    Blackboard Official Announcements

    On March 26th, Blackboard made four simultaneous announcements through press release. They also released two additional press releases based on these four announcements.

    Blackboard / Moodlerooms / NetSpot / Moodle / Severance Key Blogs and Interviews

    Subsequently, several of the key players in the Blackboard announcements made statements through their own blogs or through media interviews. (more…)

  • My Blackboard Open Source Post: A Correction

    I screwed up.

    My recent post about Blackboard’s moves into open source was a particularly challenging one to organize coherently. While wrestling with that, I failed to give my usual attention to the tone. As a result of that oversight, I communicated a substantially different message than the one that I intended to communicate. I don’t believe in rewriting my posts after they are published (unless it’s on the level of a typo fix), because I believe in being accountable for what I have posted. So instead, I have inserted a short correction notice into the original post and will issue a longer one here.

    The problem can be best illustrated with the T-shirt that I placed into the post:

    There is a story behind that shirt. It was a gift. While at the Open Ed conference, Blackboard employees George Kroner and Jarl Jonas generously offered to walk me through the details surrounding some recent announcements about Blackboard’s support for OER in CourseSites. As I wrote in a subsequent blog post based on the information I got from George and Jarl, my conclusion was that Blackboard had made a sincere and substantial contribution to the advancement of OERs. At the end of the conversation the two gentlemen, I mentioned that I have a T-shirt from every major LMS except Blackboard. The one pictured here was kindly sent to me by George in response. Even a casual glance at it shows that it is not an official Blackboard T-shirt. I interpreted it as something created by the employees as an expression of affection for Ray’s personal investment in their openness effort. That’s what it meant to me and that’s what made me think of posting it.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t provide that context in the post. Along with my text, it easily could have been interpreted as a suggestion that Ray is trying to hog the limelight. Anybody who knows him even a little bit would not find that credible. I did not mean to suggest that Ray was looking to take credit for the open source move. Rather, I meant to suggest that he is looking to claim responsibility for it. I interpret him as saying, roughly, “To the degree that I’ve earned your trust, please trust me on this. I am personally invested in it.” He wasn’t bragging, nor was he slamming other Blackboard executives. So, my bad for not writing clearly.

    Ray wrote me a respectful and entirely appropriate email calling my attention to the passage in question. He took particular pains to emphasize that the T-shirt was not a Blackboard PR effort intended for external audiences, but rather “a humorous element of our cocktail party.” I do get push-back about my posts by their subjects from time to time and only feel compelled to respond when the objection has merit. This one did.

  • The Blackboard Announcements, Part 1: What the Heck Happened?

    For those of you who have been living under a rock, you may have missed a cluster of announcements from Blackboard this week:

    There has been a lot of really good, thoughtful coverage on the web about these developments. I recommend starting with the e-Literate friends and family, including Phil Hill’s post right here on this blog, Audrey Watters’ passionate rant on Hack Education, Rob Reynolds’ commentary at his blog, The Learning Lot, and frequent and eloquent e-Literate commenter Kate Bowles’ ruminations on her highly worthwhile Music for Deck Chairs blog. Those posts, in turn, link to other really good posts. I am really impressed with the level of sophistication of the dialog that the educational community is having about these developments.

    That said, I do think that there is more to add before we have exhausted the topic. I’m going to provide my own thoughts on what Blackboard is up to in this post and an analysis of what this means for non-Blackboard customers—particularly users of open source platforms—in a follow-up post.

    (more…)

  • Instructure Steps Up for Open Education

    Friday evening, I wrote in a blog post:

    If you are a large for-profit education company—say, an LMS vendor or a textbook company—give $5,000 to the DS106 Kickstarter project. At that level of contribution, in addition to all the benefits of the lower levels, you’ll get a mention as doing a really swell thing on the fabulous e-Literate weblog.

    I’m thrilled to say that it took Instructure less than 24 hours to step up to the plate:

    That is just spectacular. We should all take note of a company that did not hesitate when presented with an opportunity to help out a great grassroots open education project. I very much hope that other education companies will step up to the plate.

    There are a couple of things that I think are particularly praiseworthy about DS106. First, it’s  a course that teaches digital literacy in a way that has proven effective and inspiring for a wide range of students. That’s huge and much needed in and of itself. But I also think that the course presents a replicable model for doing open education on a wide range of topics on a small budget, while teaching students some basic digital literacy through its very structure. Even if the course subject isn’t something like digital storytelling, the DS106 model has each student set up her own blog and participate in a distributed community. If you think that is an unreasonably high barrier, then you probably haven’t set up a blog recently. Having students set up their own web sites, understand how they work at a basic level, and learn what it is like to have a digital space of their own is a good and appropriate set of educational goals for an incredibly broad range of learners.

    You may wonder why making a contribution would be worthwhile, given that the project has already well exceeded its initial funding goal. If you’d like to get a sense of what the DS106 organizers may do with the extra cash, then read Jim’s post about it, including the comments. For me, a common theme jumps out that I find very exciting, and that theme is about making the DS106 model easier and more accessible to a wider range of students and teachers—developing WordPress plugins that make course setup simpler, developing a languages course using the same teaching model, and so on. I would very much like to see a community grow around helping to spread this model, test its limits, and make it more accessible to people who want to do open education across a wide range of subjects.

    That’s why I’m hoping that folks like Ray Henderson, John Baker, Adrian Sannier, and others with significant budgets will step up and add further funding to this project. And, of course, you don’t have to be a captain of industry to make a contribution. You can contribute whatever money you think you can spare as an individual. Remember, DS106 achieved its initial funding goal in less than 24 hours, before Instructure stepped up. Individuals making $5 and $25 contributions did that. Your contribution matters. In fact, one of the lessons of DS106 in general is that you don’t have to have deep pockets and an enterprise IT infrastructure to make a big impact in education. To the degree that large contributors like Instructure are stepping up, it is because they are following your lead. Before smARThistory was “acquired” by Khan Academy, it was funded by contributors like you in a Kickstarter project.

  • Some Things You Should Do

    1. If you have any spare change, give a few dollars to the DS106 Kickstarter project. They may have exceeded their initial funding goal, but Jim is going to write up some ideas of what he would do if he had more money and post them to the Kickstarter site. I’m guessing he can come up with an idea or three.
    2. If you are a large for-profit education company—say, an LMS vendor or a textbook company—give $5,000 to the DS106 Kickstarter project. At that level of contribution, in addition to all the benefits of the lower levels, you’ll get a mention as doing a really swell thing on the fabulous e-Literate weblog.
    3. If you are a mobile apps developer interested in education, enter the Desire2Learn Build Something That Matters challenge. It doesn’t even have to integrate with D2L. This is a great initiative by Desire2Learn, and I will be one of the contest judges.
    4. If you’re within driving distance of the greater Boston area and have time on April 12th, come to the NERCOMP Northeast Open Initiatives event in Norwood, MA. I will be a panelist. Not that anything interesting has been happening in educational open source lately, but I’m sure we’ll think of something to talk about.