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.

  • Update to the Sakai 3 Timeline

    Sakai Foundation Interim Executive Director Lois Brooks just posted a brief update to the Sakai 3 development plans. The detail that stood out to me is this:

    The new project brings together the existing body of work, and the existing teams, into a single, coordinated effort, and aims for a completed version that is feature-equivalent to Sakai 2 in mid-2011. [Emphasis added.]

    This represents a change from the earlier road map that didn’t anticipate having a full Sakai 2 replacement until 2012.

    A couple of caveats are in order. First, nobody really knows what it means for Sakai 3 to be “feature-equivalent” to Sakai 2. Whenever you move to a new system design, some features that made sense in the old world just don’t make sense in the new one. That’s particularly true in this case, Since Sakai 3 is very different from Sakai 2 in both functional design philosophy and underlying architecture. For schools currently on other platforms, this doesn’t matter much. The “feature-equivalent” tag simply conveys the Sakai 3 project team’s confidence that they are releasing a competitive product. For current Sakai schools, the issue is more complicated. They will have to look whether anything that matters to them will get lost in translation.

    Second, people on the project team tell me that, at this point, 2011 should be considered to be something closer to an aspirational goal than a due date derived from a detailed project plan. In June, there will be development planning sessions both immediately before and immediately after the Sakai conference. A lot of work gets done at these sessions. Over the month or so following, more gels as attendees go home and rally their troops and as tentative decisions are finalized through communications with stakeholders who may not have been able to attend the conference. We’ll know a lot more by mid-July.

    For now, the main take-away here is that the Sakai 3 development team is expressing an increasing sense of confidence in the project’s resourcing.

    Update: After rereading some emails, I’d like to slightly downgrade my adjective from “confidence” to “optimism.” One early test will be to see whether schools step forward with additional resources once the project plan is fleshed out. Again, much of this will happen in roughly the Sakai conference time frame. There is a lot of interest in participation being expressed within the Sakai community, but we don’t know yet whether that interest will translate into resource commitments in sufficiently large numbers to ensure delivery on this more aggressive schedule.

    Stay tuned.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2

    Image: University of North Carolina

    I write a fair bit about Sakai 3 because I am excited about the possibilities for change that it represents. That said, there are a couple of points worth emphasizing. First, Sakai 3 doesn’t exist yet and won’t be adoptable as a full LMS for a while. (See Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It for details.) Second, Sakai 2 is a very good current-generation LMS that is meeting the needs of many schools today.

    University of North Carolina, which has been piloting Sakai 2, has been putting out some excellent evaluation materials on it. (See UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results, for example.) Their Sakai pilot blog also contains some gems. For example, they have identified five “big ideas” that they believe represent some of Sakai’s strengths—particularly in comparison to Blackboard, their current LMS. Here is a video describing the first of those ideas:

    In addition to the school-wide evaluation, the UNC medical school has been looking at Sakai to meet their more specialized needs. (See Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine.) They have some niche requirements which are critical for them, foremost of which is a good calendaring system. Here’s a video of medical school faculty talking about how Sakai works for them:

  • Why OER Advocates Should Be Happy About the iPad

    I got some comments on my Blackboard iPad post specifically regarding the push toward native—and therefore proprietary—apps and away from standards-based web apps. This concern is just one example of a constellation of complaints about how Apple is too closed. I understand those complaints and am not going to argue with them here. But whether you love Apple or hate them, whether you will buy an iPad or not, I think it’s clearly the case that the iPad’s success will increase adoption of Open Educational Resources.

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  • Should Pandora Have Opened the Box?

    A few days ago, I had the following Twitter exchange with Anya Kamenetz:

    Me: @opencontent @anya1anya Here’s why I fear the university system may be unable to adapt to open education: http://bit.ly/cF0Hby

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 as a system, probably not. Legacy assets/components? Yes. Roman Empire falls. Rome (city) thrives to this day.

    Me: @anya1anya Easier to be blithe about the fall of the Roman Empire given that the Romans who suffered through it are all dead.

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 I’m not blithe about any of this. I think the times we live in are utterly terrifying.

    Me: @anya1anya Terrifying is the right word. The question we face is, what was Pandora’s moral obligation *after* she opened the box?

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 Pandora or Cassandra? tbc on http://diyubook.com/

    Me: @anya1anya Depends. Are we agents or witnesses? Maybe both. But I think it’s easier to be Cassandra than Pandora. No responsibility.

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 Actually, I’m just the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes.

    Me: @anya1anya I don’t buy that. If you believe it, then why bother writing the book? You are only Cassandra if you choose to be.

    I was surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) to then see her reflect on this exchange thusly:

    We just need to start being very creative about how we deal with the acceleration. I want to be a friend of change. I think there’s been a little bit of a debate already about the book coming out. I get asked, Are you a Pandora opening up Pandora’s Box, or are you a Cassandra, declaiming that things are doomed and that other things are coming up in their place? I kind of don’t want to take responsibility for either of these [viewpoints]. I think we are all imagining a different kind of future and I want to be on the side of the future and not on the side of the past.

    It certainly wasn’t my intention to imply that Anya personally is releasing all the horrors from the box. Nor, I see now, was the idea I have in my head regarding Pandora (and Cassandra, for that matter) what came through in my tweets. Apparently, Twitter is not a good medium for midrash. I have also struggled to communicate the same feelings in conversations with folks like Jim Groom and Stephen Downes. So I’m going to try something a little different here and take an uncharacteristic flight of literary fancy. I hope you will indulge me.

    The question I want to address is this: Should Pandora have opened the box?

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  • Blackboard's iPad App and its implications

    Ray Henderson has a post up about his sense of responsibility to customers regarding balancing innovation with mature products (careful refinements in features and support services to meet customer needs) versus innovation in new areas (bold thinking and experiments). It’s vintage Ray—thoughtful, balanced, and customer-focused. And while Ray is always the first person to admit that words and deeds do not amount to the same thing, I suspect that Blackboard customers are going to be pleased to hear the company’s leadership talking this way.

    Ray also unwrapped a demo video of Blackboard’s new iPad application:

    Honestly, this looks like a promising app. If I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and had an iPad, I would want it. I would go further and say that if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one. One common weakness of LMSs is that they don’t always make multitasking easy. Blackboard’s iPad app appears to help in that area. Of course, we don’t know just how much functionality is covered, which is critical. But conceptually speaking, I find the execution to be appealing. The LMS may not be your bag, but if you have to use one heavily, then this may not be a bad way to go.

    Let’s tease out a few additional implications:

  • Gartner on Higher Education: a Conversation at Georgetown University

    This is a guest post by Paul Heald. Paul is a teaching faculty member at George Washington University completing his master’s program in information systems technology in May 2010. Paul earned his Master’s degree in education from the University of Manchester and Bachelor’s degree from Keele University. He has taught and served as an administrator in public and private high schools. Upon graduation he will be joining the staff of Sigma Systems Inc., where he will focus on the networked applications design.

    Gartner's Jan-Martin Lowendahl

    Gartner’s Jan-Martin Lowendahl has authored several insightful analyses on information technology in colleges and universities. ((Other reports authored by Lowendahl and his colleagues:

    The Business Impact of Social Computing on Higher Education with Marti Harris, 9 September 2008.

    Financial Slowdown Emphasizes Budget-Planning Effectivess in Higher Educaton, but It’s About Yield, Not Cost with Michael Zastrocky and Marti Harris, 21 March 2008.

    Four ‘Business Model’ Scenarios for Higher Education: An Introduction to Strategic Planning Through Storytelling with Marti Harris, 17 September 2009.

    Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey 2008-2009: Poised for the Next Step? With Marti Harris, 14 December 2008.

    Hype Cycle for Education, 2009 with contributing Gartner staff, 27 July 2009.

    Key issues for Higher Education 2009: The Future is Now, Strategic Planning Capabilities Are Crucial with Marti Harris, 27 February 2010.)) These include “Key Issues for Higher Education, 2010” published in February. Here, Lowendahl and his colleagues wrote:

    Gartner will continue to help CIOs keep up with current technological trends so as not to be caught in a dead end and to avoid costly changes in strategy. The 2010 research will include continued coverage of student trends, identity and access management (IAM) and standards.

    Lowendahl briefed members of the Georgetown University faculty and staff and invited Washington, DC area higher education CIOs and their staff on March 18th.

    Although the meeting was brief, Lowendahl covered a great deal of material, engendering considerable discussion among the assembled group.

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  • Advice for mLearning App Developers

    My colleague Mark Wilcox, now the product manager for Oracle Virtual Directory but formerly a developer at WebCT, wrote me with some good advice to mLearning developers:

    I wrote the first mobile app for WebCT as my last presentation at WebCT’s user conference before leaving. That may have been the first ever mobile app for any LMS, now that I think about it.

    Here is the advice I would give for apps that are thinking of a mobile strategy:

    1. Focus on having a decent experience using the Android and iPhone browser. Luckily it’s basically the same browser. Nozbe – which is a new Getting Things Done service – does this very well. I have it linked off my iPhone home screen and it looks/acts just alike an app at that point.
    2. If your app has data that updates – for example discussion forums, calendar reminders, notices of new assignments – make sure those area available as RSS/Atom feeds. This makes it possible to consume them in a number of different formats and opens possibility to get a mobile app using one of the app-generation services like AppMaker or MobileRoadie.
    3. I would stick with a mobile web only strategy unless you have a true compelling reason to build an app. One reason could be that you need to send push notifications – a mobile Web can’t yet do that, but a mobile app can. Another could be to control the brand experience. For example you don’t want people to have a bad idea about your product because you let a 3rd party app be the mobile app and it’s not implemented well. I wouldn’t try to prevent those apps if you have a public API , but I would want to make sure I had the best app optimizing the experience. I think EBay has done this particularly well. Oracle has also released a few iPhone apps which give an idea of how to take subsets of functionality and optimize them for the mobile phone.