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 2007 Edublog Awards Final Voting is Open

    The nominations are in and voting is now open for the 2007 Edublog Awards (a.k.a. “the Eddies”). I am honored to say that e-Literate is a finalist in the Best Individual Blog category.

    Now comes the best part. You get to go through the list of finalists and discover all the gems that you never knew existed. The conveners (Josie Fraser and James Farmer), have promised that they will be publishing a del.icio.us feed of all the nominees, but in the meantime, the list of finalists should keep you busy with lots of good reading. (Many thanks, Josie and James!)

    Go explore, and don’t forget to vote!

  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics, Part II

    I’ve been a little surprised at the amount of attention–both positive and negative–that my first post in this series has received. I want to address some of the comments on the negative side. There seems to be some concern that systems like D2L’s might promote bureaucratic mandates that increase burdens on teachers, or that they reduce teaching to training. I understand where these concerns are coming from, but I wonder how much of this is really about terminology. There seems to be an allergic reaction to the terms “competency” and “learning objective,” perhaps even to the point where the language is getting in the way of our being able to objectively assess the educational affordances of the software.

    So I’m going to change my plan a bit for this series. In this post, I’d like to try to abstract away from the terminology and lay out a framework that will hopefully let us explore those affordances without the linguistic baggage dragging us down. Fundamentally, I’m going to propose that the most productive way to think about a system such as D2L’s is in terms of metadata. When we use tags (for example), nobody really thinks that the total value of the object being tagged can be reduced to the meaning of the tags themselves. It’s just not even a serious question. So what happens to our understanding of competency modeling in the context of higher education when we think about it as a tagging exercise?

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  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I

    Anyone who has been awake in higher education in the last couple of years knows that there is a lot of attention on outcomes and assessment lately (although with distinctly different emphases in the U.S. and the E.U.). A natural consequence of this attention is that the various LMS platform developers are adding capabilities that are focused in this area. Blackboard has probably created the biggest splash with their highly promoted Outcomes product, but all the major platforms are doing work in this area, to different degrees and employing different strategies. I’ve been curious for some time about how the different approaches to this thorny problem space will shape up, which is why I am grateful that Ken Chapman, Desire2Learn’s Leade Product Manager, was willing to sit down with me at EDUCAUSE and talk to me about what D2L is doing in this area.

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  • Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Involving the Teachers

    One of my biggest concerns about the Sakai community from Day 1 has been the need to involve more teachers more directly in the design of the platform. I think that when people hear that they sometimes think of those painfully ineffective design-by-committee initiatives that universities always try and that never work. That’s not really what I had in mind. At the Amsterdam conference, I heard Michael Korcuska express my concern in a way that’s much more clear and effective than anything I’ve formulated on the topic.

    He said the Sakai community needs a Product Manager role. And that’s exactly right. We need product managers, many of whom should be teachers.
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  • Usability Absolutely Does Matter for Adoption

    Chris Coppola has a good post up regarding Sakai adoption. Chris, in turn, is responding to a comment from Trace Urdan in Education Signals:

    Sakai adoption is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues, but by obstacles to the risk/rewards of an open source solution to begin with. Wider Sakai adoption, we think, is more likely to come about by increased activity among its commercial supporters than by tweaks to the platform itself.

    It is absolutely true that adoption of open source user-facing apps in higher education is particularly limited right now by the perception that there is not adequate commercial support (which is why I was particularly pleased to see Sakai’s Executive Director Michael Korcuska acknowledge the importance of the Sakai Commercial Affiliates in a recent blog post).

    However, it is absolutely false that Sakai adoption “is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues.” I have spoken to people at more than one institution in recent weeks where decision-makers either chose not to implement Sakai or chose not to broaden their implementation of Sakai because of usability concerns. By the same token, I have spoken to folks recently whose universities have rejected other LMS platforms where user experience was a big reason for the decision. (Sakai is certainly not the only LMS with usability challenges. Not by a long shot.) The issue of whether you can actually…well…teach and learn with a platform is (thankfully) becoming a real and significant criterion in university adoption processes.

    The Sakai community is doing the right thing by prioritizing user experience improvements. I have no doubt that success will impact adoption.

  • Oracle Doing the Web 2.0 Thing

    I generally don’t blog about my employer too much, since this is a personal blog. But Oracle is doing some interesting (and perhaps surprising) Web 2.0ish things that I thought were worth noting. First, the company now has an official wiki, based on WetPaint, which is open to customers and employees alike for building up an Oracle-related knowledge base. Second, there’s a new external-facing Oracle social network called Mix. The two most compelling features, I think, are the ability to suggest and promote product-related ideas and to ask and answer questions. (By the way, for the geeks in the crowd, Mix is written in JRuby and run on the Oracle technology stack.)

    I have no idea how any of this will develop or how my own group (the Academic Enterprise Solutions group) will end up participating in these initiatives. But it’s an interesting experiment for such a large company, and it bears watching.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Vision for the Technology

    I am honored to announce that I have been nominated to the Sakai Foundation Board by current Board member Ian Dolphin on behalf of the University of Hull. Over the next few weeks between now and the election, I’m going to outline my platform in series of blog posts, starting with this one about the future direction for the Sakai platform that I would like to help bring about.

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