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.

  • The Evolution Will Not Be Televised

    My apologies. I lied to you, Dear Reader. I had told you that I would videotape OpenWorld for you. But as I had feared, it just didn’t seem right. There was too much awkwardness (due to the fact that I’m an Oracle employee) without enough return. Besides, I was crazy busy. So no video.

    One thing I will say, though, is that I’m proud Oracle took a number of serious measures to try to be more green. Some of these efforts were more successful than others, of course. Among the most successful were probably (a) the huge reduction of paper waste by creating kiosks where people could download and print collateral rather than handing them lots of stuff that they will throw away (we were actually prohibited from handing out paper on the demo floor) and (b) the rejection of giving out water bottles in favor of water refilling stations and compostable (yes, compostable) “plastic” cups:

    Water, Water Everywhere

    Among the least successful? Exercise bikes that you could ride to recharge your laptop or cell phone:

    Thinking About It...Nah

    Not exactly a lot of fitness fanatics in the crowd.

     

  • IMS Learning Information Services: Enabling Innovation

    In my previous posts on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables. In recent guest posts, Inigral‘s Michael Staton wrote about the Schools on Facebook application and also let the cat out of the bag that Schools works with Oracle’s LIS implementation, called SAIP. (I couldn’t respond publicly at the time because Oracle’s product hadn’t been officially released yet.) The details of what Inigral has done here are worth exploring, both because they demonstrate how LIS can be used to do new and exciting things and because they provide some clarity about how to think about (and to not think about) social software and PLEs.

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  • Chronicle's Article on Blackboard's Competition

    Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:

    I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services…I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.

    This is entirely consistent with Blackboard’s strategy,  outlined in one of my recent posts, of arguing that they are more “enterprise-y” than their competition because they are bigger and spend more money. As Michael K points out, this particular rehearsal of the argument based on developer numbers is specious in a number of ways. But another thing to consider here is that maybe the brute force that Blackboard has to apply in terms of developer numbers to produce their product may indicate that they are actually doing something wrong. 

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  • When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder

    Here at e-Literate, we’ve been arguing for some time that part of the edupatent problem rests squarely on the shoulders of the many universities that pursue profits from intellectual property too aggressively, at the expense of their mission. Well, there’s a New York Times piece out this week that makes the same case.

    Read it, please.

  • IMS Learning Information Services: What a Solution Looks Like

    In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.

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  • Blackboard's NG Strategy

    A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.

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  • Back In Business

    Sorry?!
    photo credit: iluvcocacola

    e-Literate is back in business and ready to go. Which is good, because I have a backlog of posts I want to get to.

    Before I do, though, I want to acknowledge two great additions to my blogging arsenal. First of all, the WordPress theme I’m using is called “Thematic,” and it’s by Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper. I think it’s very easy to read and navigate, which is the top characteristic I was looking for. Ian was also terrific in providing technical support. Second, I have discovered a great plug-in called Photo Dropper that lets me search for Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and drop them into my post, all right from my WordPress “Write a Post” page. Expect to see more images in my posts in the future.