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.

  • Blackboard's Wimba and Elluminate Acquisitions

    I have often said that, if you want to understand the likely future behavior of a publicly traded company, the best way to approach it is to think of it as a complex money-making machine. If you can understand how the machine works, then you can make reasonable guesses as to how it will behave under different circumstances and the degree to which that behavior is likely to help or hurt your interests.

    There has been a lot of hand-wringing about Blackboard’s announced acquisitions of Wimba and Elluminate. Let’s look at the facts.

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  • Sakai 3 Learning Capabilities Lenses

    A while back, I asked David Goodrum to write a guest post about some of the work that the Sakai Teaching & Learning Group has been doing to articulate the educational goals and requirements for Sakai 3. The document that they have been working on is called the Sakai Learning Capabilities document, and it entered a 1.0 release just prior to the start of the Denver Sakai conference. This is very important work that will certainly impact the future of Sakai and could have a wider impact in instructional technology.

    The group articulate seven “lenses”, which you might think of as functional goals or even as design values for Sakai 3. They are called lenses because each one presents a different view or perspective of any given piece of functionality within Sakai 3 (or any piece of educational technology, really). Every tool and capability within the system should be examined from the perspective of each of the seven lenses at some point in the design phase to help the designers make sure that they are upholding the design values of the system wherever and whenever possible. Each lens contains several finer-grained “facets” which are, again, intended to help software designers ask the right questions as they are designing educational capabilities. These lenses include capabilities for addressing traditional LMS and ePortfolio as well as important educational scenarios that are not handled well by today’s systems.

    Here’s what version 1.0 of the lenses looks like as a mind map:

    Sakai Learning Capabilities v1 Mind Map

    Note that at least two of Dan Pink’s three drivers of motivation are articulated on the map. Autonomy is called out fairly directly as a lens. I would argue that “mastery” is represented in some of the facts of the “learning activities” lens. (Interestingly, the facet descriptors in the “assessment/evaluation” lens seem relatively devoid of connections to mastery at this point, although in fairness, there’s a lot more thought and analysis underneath this mind map that the descriptors may not be capturing.) I’m not sure that Dan Pink’s third motivator—purpose—can be wired into software, although I’ll be keeping my eye out for examples of it.

    The key for the community will be to figure out how to translate these design values into concrete processes during the software design and development process. I have some ideas about how to go about this this. I hope/expect to write about them in a future post.

  • Sakai Conference: Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards

    One of the best aspects of the annual Sakai conference is the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards (TWSIA). Every year, several teachers in the Sakai community are honored for their work and give presentations on what they’re doing in the classroom. This year, the TWSIA presentations were the keynote on the second day of the conference. The point of these awards isn’t to sing the praises of the Sakai software. Rather, it’s to (a) celebrate the work of some outstanding teachers, (b) remind all the people who contribute to the development and support of Sakai of why their work matters, and (c) give Sakai developers more direct exposure to how teachers are working online and what kinds of capabilities they need and and actually use.

    This year, the first place winner was Dr. Scott Bowman, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. Here’s an interview of him talking about his juvenile justice course:

    What’s striking to me is how well his course lines up with Dan Pink’s three elements of motivation, which I wrote about in my last post:

    • Autonomy: Dr. Bowman’s students are given a lot of room to take their own initiative regarding how they research their assigned cities. It sounds like many took full advantage of that opportunity, going above and beyond the minimum required of them.
    • Mastery: Because students studied different aspects of the same city over the entire course of the semester, they were able to grow their expertise. As Dr. Bowman told his students at the end of the semester, they probably new more about their cities than many of the folks that they talked to and many of the agencies that were responsible for the juveniles in their city.
    • Purpose: Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the course is that students were studying real juveniles in real places with real consequences. They knew that what they were talking about matters. It wasn’t all hypothetical textbook stuff. The students were able to “see themselves as practitioners.”

    In terms of the technology, it wasn’t anything special. Dr. Bowman was using the relatively basic wiki tool in Sakai. And that’s a fairly important point. These students needed neither fancy LMS doodads nor radically different PLEs nor the burning down of the university as an institution. This worked on good old-fashioned student-centered teaching, with the help of a pretty basic social web tool, but used in a way that subverts the expectations of the typical classroom kabuki. (Hello, Secret Revolution.)

    With all the talk about the technology, it’s easy to forget, especially when observing from the outside, that Sakai is first and foremost a community of people who are passionate about improving education. That’s one reason why I’ve been so delighted to see the TWSIA take increasing prominence at the conferences over the last few years.

    Here’s the conference keynote presentations of the first- and second-place winners. It starts with awards for Sakai Fellows—people who are recognized for their great work in supporting the community in various ways. The keynote introduction begins at around 12:00.

  • Sakai Conference: Kamenetz Keynote

    OK, this was worth the wait. I have video of Anya Kamenetz’s keynote, which set the tone for the Sakai Conference 2010 in some important ways. I also have a short video interview with her, some related video content from Dan Pink, and of course, analysis of what all this means for educational technology in general and for the design of Sakai 3 in particular.

    Be warned: It will take you over 90 minutes to consume all the content from this post. Not counting post-consumption rumination. ((Did I or did I not warn you about impending blogorrhea? I believe I did.))

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  • Instructure Canvas: A New LMS Entrant

    We’re making progress on getting the Sakai conference keynote videos online, but while we wait for those to be ready for the kick-off to the conference post series, I’d like to take advantage of the unexpected lull to write a bit about a new LMS entrant that I had an opportunity to learn about recently. Instructure‘s Canvas product is one of a new generation of LMS’s being created by start-ups that seem to be suddenly popping up everywhere. It has some of the Web 2.0 features that you would expect, like easy personal profile integration with external social networking sites and easy video embedding. But unlike, say, NIXTY—another start-up that really emphasizes open education—Instructure’s big theme seems to be getting back to basics—in a good way.

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  • DIY U: The Modern Guild at Work

    I’m waiting for the video of Anya Kamenetz’s keynote to be available online before I kick off my post series on the Sakai conference. In the meantime, here’s a quick update on a previous (and Kamenetz-related) post. A while back, I suggested that a modern variant on the guild approach could pull apprentices straight out of high school and train them in a craft while getting them started in a career directly. I also speculated that the software industry would be a good candidate for helping such a career path become socially acceptable for students looking to get into white collar jobs:

    [W]ould a young person who is already from a relatively high economic bracket consider this guild system to be an acceptable career path? Would the guild path be accepted as a substitute for four years of full-time college study by middle-class students and their parents? It would take some work, but I believe it could be possible. Software development is one example of an industry that might be a good pioneer of this approach. If, say, Microsoft or Google were to take students out of high school to become paid employees and put them on an apprenticeship path where they would be able to earn their degrees over time at lower cost while earning good salaries and becoming shareholders in the company, this approach could become acceptable in a hurry.

    Interestingly, it turns out that Zoho has a highly successful apprenticeship program at their India Development Center. Here’s an interview about it with CEO Sridhar Vembu that I found via this O’Reilly Radar post:

    Basically, they’re taking students from the 85% to 90% of Indian high school students who would be considered poor by global standards, supplying them with some mentoring and open educational resources (translated into their native Tamil language), and paying them to go to a nine- to twelve-month crash course on how to become programmers. The students are highly successful on average and can aspire to high positions within the company. Many of them also go on to get college degrees while working, but many don’t. It never occurred to me that India would be an ideal seed bed for this approach, but it’s obvious in retrospect. There’s a huge potential workforce, including many talented young people who don’t have access to conventional educational paths. It also strikes me as only a matter of time before some enterprising university strikes a deal with Zoho to create a Walmart U-style deal where students get college credit for their apprenticeship and are tracked to a continuing degree program should they want to do so.

    There’s a lot more that’s interesting in this interview, including reflections on why such a program would be harder to start with poor U.S. neighborhoods, the challenges and secrets to the program’s success, and so on. The whole interview is well worth your time.

  • 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.