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.

  • Perspectives from a Geek with a Startup

    This is a guest post by Michael Staton for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Michael studied poverty alleviation for his BA and MA at Clark University, where he developed a lifelong commitment to education and entrepreneurship. He then spent 3 years as a high school educator and was thrust into internet start ups in the education space. Seeing Facebook Platform as a disruptive opportunity, he co-founded Inigral, Inc as a consumer internet company set out accelerate real world relationships in an academic context using the product “Courses on Facebook.” Courses quickly gained traction in the Fall of 2007 and Founders’ Fund, an investor in Facebook, made a Series A investment. Inigral is also about to release a product to help K-12 educators cope with the pressures of the accountability movement. Michael is also the author of the Edumorphology and College Readiness for the 21st Century weblogs.

    I spend most of my time in the midst of internet entrepreneurs. I work in an office with four other internet companies, go to beta launches in San Francisco, and attend panel discussions in Silicon Valley. Something that is conspicuously evident is that I’m one of the few entrepreneurs trying to solve problems in education. Another thing that’s evident, as ironic as it sounds, is that many internet entrepreneurs have given the problems in education considerable thought, many have even tried to contribute to or build a product to address needs in education at some point.

    Start-ups in education are rare, but it’s not for lack of desire to work in the space. Venture Capital appreciates the education market size: it’s huge. Everyone gets an education, and mind-numbing amounts of money are spent to that end. Entrepreneurs tend to be young risk takers, and their first-hand knowledge of problems in the education sector is ripe. However, very few go-getters can convince an Angel Investor or VC that their product for the education market is worth an investment. To boot, older entrepreneurs advise young ones to stay away from the space. Why the reluctance? The market barriers.

    In my paper, I comprehensively address barriers to market entry into the education market and propose some easy solutions. I focus on a set of interdependent forces particularly destructive to outside innovation; there is a causal relationship between public rhetoric and legal protections based on misunderstandings of internet use and political decision making, creating a risk-averse, zero sum purchasing process that requires an abnormally large and unhealthy investment in sales and support efforts.

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  • Secret Society Maybe Not So Secret

    Since I complained recently about the IMS needing to open up more, it’s only fair that I should give credit when they actually do it. Chuck Severence, who now works part-time for the IMS, has a public test site up for people who want to test against a subset of the forthcoming Learning Tool Interoperability specification. Now, the full specification drafts are still non-public (to the extent that they even exist–LTI is still under active development) but, to be honest, hardly anybody reads the full spec anyway. What Chuck has done is much more useful because he’s providing sufficient documentation and tools for people to actually start building and testing LTI-compliant tools without a lot of extraneous gobbledygook. All it needs now is a feedback forum, and the IMS will suddenly have a very open and results-oriented (though perhaps not yet comprehensive) process for non-IMS members to provide feedback on specs in development.

    Brilliant work. Really, a very big step forward.

    On a side note, Chuck mentions the use of REST in the documentation. Thus far, the IMS has been pretty SOAP-heavy in its approach to web services. If the LTI group is indeed making judicious use of REST (which would make particular sense given the nature of what they’re trying to do) then that also is a Very Good Thing.

  • Blackboard Inc. Shows Deep Compassion for Desire2Learn Customers

    As expected, Blackboard has taken Desire2Learn back to court, claiming that 8.3 still infringes and charging them with contempt. Interestingly, the news of this showed up simultaneously in Inside Higher Education, THE Journal, and The Chronicle. It looks like Blackboard may have something to say that they want to make sure we all hear.

    What could it be?

    Here’s one candidate, said by Matt Small to Inside Higher Education:

    “We have all along said and continue to say, and mean, that we don’t want to do anything that will disrupt D2L’s clients, so if D2L should be held in contempt or sanctioned or if it should go bankrupt … we would hate to see a D2L school inadvertently shut down unexpectedly because D2L does not survive, and we’re committed to working with the schools to help them find a non-infringing alternative that is on their budget and on their time frame and of their choice,” he said. [emphasis added]

    How sweet. In a Tony Soprano sort of way, that is.

  • Distributed Learning Environment Posts Coming

    I am delighted to announce the beginning of a series of guest posts on distributed learning environments by the authors who will be contributing to a forthcoming special double issue on the topic in On the Horizon. Each post will provide an introduction to the article that will appear in the issue when it is published some time in the first half of next year. We have a rather ambitious schedule for the series; I hope to publish three of these guest posts a week over the next month or so. The first, by the OU’s Martin Weller, will be up shortly. I encourage you all to comment on the posts. Your input may well help to shape the final articles.

  • I, Too, Am a Twit

    For a long time, I vowed never to get sucked into Twitter. The idea of broadcasting my every belch and hiccup to the world in real time just struck me as absurdly narcissistic. Of course, I made exactly the same vow about blogging for largely the same reason back in the day and, well, here we are.

    And thus it was that I observed myself with detached amusement as Nate Angell (a.k.a. @xolotl…his gang name, I guess) succeeded in convincing me to give it a try when we sat down to lunch (along with Mike Zackrison) at JA-SIG last month. Nate, in addition to being super-sharp about ed tech issues in general, is also one of the best conceptual salesmen I’ve ever met. Seriously. By the time he was done working me over, I was like, “@Dude, WTF was I thinking? I have to download Twhirl and start tweeting, like, RIGHT NOW!!”

    So I did. I gave Twhirl a whirl. Hated it. Then I tried hooking Twitter into GChat. That made me happy for a few hours until I remembered how much I hate GChat. (And don’t get me started on the state of chat clients in the Windows world.) Then I found TwitterFox, which I like and seems to work well. (I’m a Firefox extension addict anyway.) Since then I’ve been tweeting (hate that word) on and off. And now, after diving in and spending some time with Twitter, I can honestly say that…

    …uh…

    …I still don’t get it.

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  • D2L Resolves Current Patent Burdens

    According to the latest entry on D2L’s patent blog, D2L has payed the court judgment plus post-judgment interest in full and has also migrated all customers to version 8.3 of their software, which they claim does not infringe on the patent. There’s been some FUD flying around about whether D2L could handle the financial impact of the judgment. Well, they just did handle it. End of discussion.

  • Opening Up the IMS

    In general, I am a fan of the IMS. I believe that we need interoperability standards in education, and I think that the IMS’s recent work such as the released Common Cartridge standard, the in-progress Enterprise Services v2 (now called Learning Information Services, or LIS) and Learning Tool Interoperability standards, and the foundational requirements work happening within the Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC) are going to prove to be important drivers of learning impact over the next several years. That said, I am also highly sympathetic to complaints about the IMS’s policy of members-only access to specifications under development. There’s something fundamentally contradictory about open standards being developed behind closed doors.

    Over the past 18 months, I have had the privilege of participating in the IMS work on a regular basis. During that time, I have mostly kept my mouth shut about the openness issue. Out of respect for the staff and the board, I wanted to experience the process from the inside and see how it works today before advocating change. But at the Learning Impact conference last month, I decided to speak out.

    I didn’t mince words. At one point I said, “I know plenty of people in the ed tech community–good people, exactly the kind of people that we need to participate–who think that the IMS is some kind of secret society.” I got a fair few “amens” from other participants, both publicly and privately. To his credit, IMS CEO Rob Abel responded positively and non-defensively. (I expected nothing less.) In the spirit of that dialog, I am going to articulate my case for the further opening of the IMS specification development process here.

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