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.

  • Permissions and Usability

    No Fishing....
    Creative Commons licensed; photo credit: Angus Mackie

    In a recent post, I reviewed the advantages of Bodington’s unusual system of assigning access privileges and mentioned that the Sakai community is planning to support Bodington-like permissions in a future version. There was some follow-up discussion of this on the Sakai pedagogy listserv. In particular, John Norman pointed out that the more flexible permissions structure comes with significant usability challenges. I don’t have any clear-cut solutions to these problems, but I’m going to think out loud here and see where I can get with it all.

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  • Your Predictions for 2008?

    Well, it’s December 30th, and I have already gotten my first invitation to contribute to a “predictions for 2009” article. And it got me thinking about a twist on the question. What developments in the world of educational technology during 2008 will turn out to be more important in retrospect than they were widely recognized to be at the time?

    Discuss below.

  • Twitter in the Classroom

    Sarah Milstein, author of the O’Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution, pointed me to this blog post with a lot of interesting suggestions about how to use Twitter as a teaching tool. It’s good reading, and the Academic Hack blog (which I hadn’t heard of) looks like a good new addition to my RSS reader.

  • The Pirate Hoax

    A friend asked me what I think about the story in the Chronicle about the professor who encouraged his students to create a hoax story about a pirate in order to teach them about students about vetting the quality of their sources as part of a history class. They created a blog about the fake history and added a Wikipedia page about the fictional pirate. Then they “Facebooked, Twittered, and Shoutwired it.” The professor pulled the plug when he found out that some of his historian colleagues were buying into the hoax.

    So what do I think of it? I think it stinks.

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  • The Quest for Openness

    I have signed up for David Wiley’s Introduction to Openness class. It’s free for online participants (although you don’t get college accreditation for it). In an intriguing move, he’s modeled the course somewhat after RPGs, where course “credit” (whatever that means in this model) depends on class- and guild-dependent quests. I will probably play a Merchant, although I’m tempted to be a Bard.

  • Sakai 3 Vision Document

    Via Michael Korcuska’s blog, there is a new vision document describing the proposed path for the next major version of Sakai. If you find this interesting, then you may also want to look at the documents outlining the current thinking for Sakai 3.0 RC1 in (a little) more detail.

  • Open Forum Brain Dump

    I’m sitting in my hotel room near LAX early in the morning and I have a little time between the legs of my trip to reflect on the amazing experience I just had at The OPEN Forum. I must say, Thanos Partners did a superb job of organizing a fun, fascinating, and frictionless conference. (And the food. OMG.) I expect to write a number of posts reflecting on different facets that were covered during the forum, but this first one will mainly be a brain dump to capture a bunch of raw observations before they have a chance to fly out of my head.

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