Category: Ed Tech

Here’s another post from frequent guest poster Jim Farmer. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting news of the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn trial, Jim will be in East Texas next week and has promised at least one blog post regarding the trial.

Several weeks ago Luke Fernandez, Weber State University, asked should knowledge of “community source” be a criterion for selecting a CIO. Posting on the Sakai Advocacy list, he wrote:

My guess is that including criteria which prompt a committee to consider whether the candidate has experience leveraging the power of community source (or, more broadly speaking, “knows how to globalize”–to borrow from Thomas Friedman) might eclipse a broader more representative set of criteria that need to be articulated when considering a CIO. But I’m not sure about this–I’ll know better once we’ve met.

If anybody has conducted hiring (especially at the executive level) that includes some consideration of open source in the hiring criteria I’d be interested in how that criteria was articulated/included.

My suggestion, off list, is provided here in an edited version.

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I’m honored to announce that I’ve been asked by Tom Abeles to guest edit a special issue of On the Horizon on the topic of distributed learning environments. The goal of the issue is to create a conversation representing a full spectrum of perspectives on the growing trend toward incorporating disparate tools and environments to create a learning environment rather than using a monolithic LMS. Obviously, this covers a wide swath of territory, ranging from integrating individual tools into a unified LMS all the way to incorporating a multiple SaaS sites developed and hosted by different people and aggregated into a PLE (or not). I’m looking for common threads about real-world experiences, goals, and challenges. Who is doing what now and why? What are the real-world paths to change in universities? What are the challenges?

All to often these sorts of conversations are segregated into groups, e.g., the incrementalists don’t socialize with the revolutionaries, the implementors don’t socialize with the theorists, etc. My hope is that we can get past those divisions and start identifying common ground where immediate experimentation and collaboration can move forward. I’d also like the issue to give anyone in a university who is thinking about these issues an accessible and multi-faceted overview.

I’m looking for the following types of contributors:

• Teachers or students who can share constructive feedback based on first-hand experience in a distributed learning environment
• Application developers who can talk about user experience, data integration, or other challenges that they have dealt with when integrating two or more teaching and learning tools
• University administrators or policy makers who can described what they learned through their experience making institutional decisions about potential distributed learning environment projects

I’ve been asked by a couple of potential contributors whether the articles will be available in an open access repository. While On the Horizon is not itself open access, it has a fairly liberal copyright policy that allows authors to republish their work. I am going to encourage participants to do so in some sort of organized form. (I’ll work out the details collaboratively with the group of authors once they are selected, but my current inclination is the publish the articles as a collection in Connexions.)

Please pass this information on to anyone who you think might be interested in contributing. If there are any questions, feel free to email me: michael dot feldstein at oracle dot com.

Here’s the full text of the call for papers:

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