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.

  • ITOE: Comparing Two OpenCourseWare Styles

    It’s week three, and the course continues to elide the distinction between open education and open educational resources. That’s a shame because there’s a real opportunity to explore the differences in goals in the current assignment:

    Carefully review five (5) random courses from MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and five (5) random courses from CMU OLI (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/). Write a post on the different ideals of quality expressed in the differing course designs; describe how you feel the different designs reflect on the different universities.

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  • ITOE: Motivations for Open Education

    Well, it’s only the second week of class, and I’m already turning an assignment in late. (It was due yesterday.) I can’t even argue (plausibly, anyway) that the dog ate my blog post. So much for iron self-discipline.

    At any rate, here is this week’s assignment:

    Carefully review at least 20 pages describing motivations for the open education movement. Write a substantive post with references on the motivations of the movement.

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  • Things I Like About the Facebook Interface

    There’s a lot to dislike about the Facebook user experience. The groups capabilities are pretty anemic, for example. And don’t even get me started about making me go to a web page to respond to a private message. But I am finding some clever aspects that are worth emulating too. In particular, there is some subtle and clever work around subscription management. For example, if I comment on a photograph that somebody has posted, I am automatically subscribed to the comment stream for that photo. I have entered the conversation, and the system infers that I want to be kept abreast of it. There is nothing explicit in the user interface for this. I never had to click on “subscribe to comments” anywhere. The system figures out what I want from the actions I take.I suppose the danger of this approach is that the system will infer incorrectly and I will have no way to fix it as an end user, but so far that has not happened to me yet. I’m guessing this is because Facebook sets a fairly well-defined social context and that its designers can therefore make pretty good guesses about what people will want to have happen within that context. This sort of inferential system response is worth further thought, particularly in areas such as subscriptions and permissions, where explicit management by the users can become overwhelming very quickly. 

    Another thing I like is the “see more of” or “see less of” type features in the status updates. Sometimes I get friend requests from people I don’t know and have never heard of. Because I am now a quasi-public figure (aren’t well all?), I tend to accept these requests. But while I don’t mind these strangers listening in on the public stream of my daily life (even if I don’t quite understand why they would find it interesting), I don’t necessarily want to know what they are doing in their daily lives. So I appreciate having the ability, when a status update from a person I don’t know appears on my screen, to select the option to “see less about” that person in the future. Likewise, if I really like videos, I can choose to see more posted videos in the future. These features works well, in part, because the updates posted in Facebook are mostly casual and non-essential news items. It’s hard to see how a “see fewer homework assignments” would be such a good idea in an LMS interface, for example. But the general idea of adding accessible and coarse-grained (and therefore intuitive) controls (not “show me 30% of this person’s updates” but “show me less about this person”) is also an interesting one that is worth exploring further.

  • ITOE: History of Open Education

    Update: If I had watched the class lecture video before writing this, I would have known exactly what role open source played in early thinking about open educational resources. My bad.

    This is the first assignment post for the Introduction to Open Education (ITOE) class that I’m sitting in on. I’m tagging all assignment posts with “ITOE”. The assignment is as follows:

    Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement. Write a brief summary post on the history of the movement.

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  • Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper

    The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

    I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:

    • My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
    • Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3. 
    • Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.

    I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.

  • Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now

    Since I have made a commitment to take the umbrella concept of open education more seriously, this will be the first post in an occasional series in which I express my concerns about open education as a way of working through the issues. It is also part of an occasional series of posts about or inspired by the book . In this case, I would say “inspired by” is the correct phrase, because although the concern I want to talk about was triggered by the chapter “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”, the authors are clearly aware of the concern I raise here (as are a number of the other chapter authors in the book). My issue is more with the naive formulations of open education that I often see floating around in the blogosphere.

    Specifically, I’m afraid that the popularization of “open education” will further reduce our already stunted notion of what the verb “to educate” means until its meaning disappears altogether.

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  • Keeping Work (LMS) and Play (Social Networks) Separate?

    MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out. They’ll go there to check out what’s happening when they have a little free time, like a dorm floor lounge or a favorite pub. This is very specifically not what people want to do with work spaces, and they don’t want them mixed.  Most people don’t go to the office to hang out in their spare time. So how can social networks enhance work-like endeavors such as formal education?

    Inigral’s answer is to carry the work relationships over into the social space. If we make friends with and hang out with the people we work with, we will probably feel better about our work, try harder to please our colleagues, be less afraid to ask for help from them, etc. Other efforts that focus on embedding social networking tools directly into an academic space like an LMS may have a tougher time of it. It’s not obvious that current-generation social networking tools will transfer to direct work tasks in the way that, say, presence awareness and chat do. There’s definitely some more thinking to be done in this area.

    On a related note, Inigral has posted a survey regarding how new media is being used in higher education. If you have something to contribute in this area, please go on over and participate.